(1985)  Page(s) 17.  
 
Back to the first Norfolk garden of mine…Norfolk had been a good county for rose breeders and growers, and it was certainly more resistant than most areas to those besotted changes of fashion emanating from the Dean of Rochester and the Reverend Foster-Mellier. At the turn of the century, Norfolk was all very much as Nelson knew it.... Thus outside my breakfast room … could be found Gloire de Dijon of 1853 - though just possibly Mme. Falcot of five years later; as well as the supposed first Tea, Adam, 1833. Against the former apple store I found not only.....

(1985)  Page(s) 74.  Includes photo(s).
 
p74 ….But who was ‘Irene Watts’? Now there’s a name gone around the world, for she grew in a garden in Auckland, New Zealand, to name but one. She (the rose) was one of Monsieur Guillot’s clever projeny introduced in 1896 and labeled a china rose, but there must be a little bit more to it than that. It would be my guess that Fantin-Latour features somewhere, with the sunset flushes of Irene coming in from a real china rose. I shall illustrate her, but admit to having caught her on a dull damp morning when the pink, peach and lemon tints at her heart are not really evident. In hot, dry weather this rose will send up a great bract of blooms in varying stages of undress, and the colour range can be like an opalescent sunset, the sort that would have had Turner whipping out his little pocket watercolour set. ‘Irene Watts’ also has something of ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ about her, so if family likenesses have any bearing on this matter we might look there too. ….. It is the smooth stems of ‘Irene Watts’ that tell most of her china parentage; whereas the bloom is more than a little centifolia in its quartering, and gallica in its folding.
P75 Photo. ‘Irene Watts’.