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| Recovery after Devastation: the Aristocracy find Tender Roses ... | |||
| Towards the end of the seventeenth century and well into the next, gardens fell into rack and ruin and documents pertaining to them were lost as wars, disease and famine ravaged the country, battleground in the struggle for power that dragged on into the 1740's between Russia and Sweden. After this began a much more stable period of economic recovery. Horticultural records resume in 1750 when, we learn, Major C.F. Nordenberg of Mäntsälä Manor, just north of Helsinki, started planting roses in his garden. Having being conferred the aristocratic name of Nordenskiöld and after taking up a post that necessitated protracted stays in Stockholm, he continued to send rose bushes home for his wife to plant. These included a "large, double white rose", probably Rosa alba ´Maxima'. A few years later Per Kalm, best known for his botanical expeditions to North America, wrote in 1761 that several people were cultivating roses in their gardens. Per Gadd, for example, was growing in Turku forms of R. alba, R. americana (carolina?), R. centifolia, R. eglanteria (rubiginosa) and R. gallica. By 1790, the park of the Monrepos Estate near the then Finnish city of Viipuri (Sw: Vyborg) boasted a vast number of rose bushes, probably centifolias and gallicas. | |||
| As elsewhere in Europe, a rose mania gripped the fashion-conscious as the number of new varieties grew astronomically. Well-heeled Finnish enthusiasts could order plants from J.H. Zigra's nursery in Riga, which by 1824 was stocking over 200 rose varieties, as well as from J.G. Haetge's nursery near Tallinn, Estonia. Many of their roses were dignified with aristocratic, high-flown names such as 'Grand Monarque' and 'Duchesse d'Angoulême', which must have appealed to the high society customers who patronised these nurseries. Their assortment of varieties included the mainstream of older albas, centifolias and more recent gallicas, many of which were hardy enough to perform reasonably well in the southern and western parts of Finland - where most of the wealthy folk resided anyway. | |||
| Enthusiasts quickly learned that the ever-shifting range of novelty tea roses, bengals, bourbons, noisettes and hybrid perpetuals flowing from the hands of the French breeders during the course of the nineteenth century were far too tender to succeed outdoors even in the mildest localities, so these were exclusively grown as potted plants either in orangeries or in the cool, well-lit drawing-rooms of manor houses. As well as giving much pleasure, the plants would have provided cut flowers with which to delight (or impress?) one's social peers. | |||
| ... and, later, much Hardier Roses | |||
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Most roses were planted from imported stock, as Finland's severe climate was not conducive to propagation by grafting. As hinted above, the spectrum of varieties offered changed rapidly, and the vast majority of new varieties proved ephemeral. In time, however, efforts began in Finland to cater for local demand. One of the earliest examples of domestic enterprise was "Finska Trädgårdsodlings-Sällskapet", the (Swedish-language) Finnish Horticultural Association based in Turku, consisting of members from the local aristocracy, landowners and professionals. During the 1840's the association offered, in addition to some dozens of roses of the types mentioned above as suitable only for indoor cultivation, a number of varieties intended to be grown outside. By 1849 a handful of centifolias and gallicas were augmented by the following: present name, if different Note that the Finnish and Swedish terms for 'red' often embrace a whole gamut of tints from fairly pale pink through to deep magenta-purple. |
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There are one or two accounts of roses nurtured indoors by ordinary folk, but by and large the roses grown during this period by the "proletariat" would almost certainly have been forms of the native cinnamon and arctic roses. Sometimes wild, single-flowered roses were transplanted to homestead yards (we can hardly call them gardens), but more ornamental forms were favoured whenever such appeared. Several double-flowered, possibly native variants of R. majalis are still to be found as extensive stands around the sites of former homesteads up and down the country; these roses have very likely been in cultivation since at least the early nineteenth century, and must have been appreciated for their ornamental as well as their utilitarian properties. One of the best known is 'Tornedal' whose name indicates the Tornio (Sw: Torneå) River Valley that divides Finland from Sweden in the north; the rose is believed to have originated in this locality. Very similar is 'Foecundissima': these both produce very double, pink pom-pom flowers on sparsely thorned, reddish stems. The suckering ability and almost indestructible constitution of these roses would have endeared them to people with little time or money for serious gardening, and allowed these plants to be chopped up easily and passed from neighbour to neighbour. |
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