Rosa setigera (species)

Garden and Forest
August 18, 1897. p. 320-321.

Rosa setigera

WE have frequently called attention to the beauty and value of the Prairie Rose as a garden plant. It has been known for a century, although gardeners are only just learning its value, and, curiously enough, no good figure of it has been published until this week, when we print on page 323 the reproduction of a drawing of flowering and fruiting branches made by Mr. Faxon in the Arnold Arboretum.

Rosa setigera has been described so often that it is unnecessary to do more than to refer again to its many good qualities, its hardiness and rapid growth, its freedom from the attacks of the insects which disfigure so many Roses, and the charm of its lovely pink flowers which open about the middle of July, when the flowering time of most Roses is passed.

Rosa setigera may be trained to a pillar after the fashion usually adopted for the cultivation of its better-known offsprings, the Baltimore Belle and Queen of the Prairie, but to our taste it looks the best when allowed to grow naturally, and to send out without restriction its long arching shoots, which sometimes attain the length of twelve or fifteen feet during the season, and in their second year produce many short erect lateral branches, which bear the crowded flower-clusters toward their extremities. Planted in rich soil, with a dozen feet separating it from its nearest neighbor, the Prairie Rose will grace any garden, and if several hundred plants could be used together in one great mass to cover some broad slope or steep bank in a large park, an effect of surprising beauty would be obtained; and if in such a mass the plants were set from twelve to twenty feet apart with the ground between them carpeted with the long prostrate stems of Rosa Wichuraiana, which produces its fragrant white flowers when the Prairie Rose is blooming, a harmonious composition might be obtained.

Single plants of such flowering shrubs as Rosa setigera dotted here and there through mixed shrubberies, although in themselves beautiful, often make a plantation spotty and fail to produce the effects which might be obtained by masses of a single shrub or of two or three shrubs harmonious in form and color. The promiscuous mixing up of shrubs and trees of many countries ill-sorted in form and in the color of foliage and flower, is a common fault in most American park-planting, the result in part of a superabundance of material and in part of a want of self-restraint on the part of the planter which manifests itself in a desire to make as much show as possible without much regard for the harmony of the result. An experiment which we have suggested before of massing shrubs of the same kind together in the different parts of a large park or park system, instead of planting everywhere first a Rose, then a white-flowered Spiraea, then a Forsythia, and so on, is certainly worth a trial. Tending to secure breadth, simplicity and unity, it would at least do away with the eternal monotony of American park-planting and produce at different seasons color-effects which only the Japanese have known how to make truly effective.