Rose Letter of the Heritage Roses Groups (May 2013)
America's Mid-19th Century Rose Breeders
Darrell g.h. Schramm

Much has been written about some of America’s earliest rose breeders during the first half of the 19th century—John Champneys, Philippe Noisette, Sam Feast—and rather less about John Fraser, Caroline Herbemount, Joshua Pierce, and Daniel Boll (see my article “America’s First Rose Breeders”). But even less has been written about those who began introducing new roses in the 1850s and continued to do so for the next ten to thirty years.

Perhaps the reason is that so very few roses from that period are still in commerce—a mere three. But that meager survival does not lessen the efforts of those early breeders. Many a later rose may not have been born were it not for these intrepid breeders.

Andrew Gray was one of those. He had first worked for the rose breeder and famous rose author Robert Buist in Philadelphia but soon moved to Charleston, S.C., where he became the gardener of Governor Thomas Bennett. He also opened his own business, Commercial Gardens, where he raised a yellow seedling from ‘Cloth of Gold’ (also called ‘Chromatella’) in 1853, a tea rose which he introduced the following year, naming it for his oldest daughter Isabella Gray. That rose was to remain popular for at least thirty years. In fact, William Paul, the renowned English breeder, called it the yellowest rose in commerce. Gray also introduced ‘Jane Hardy’, named for his wife, also a yellow tea, but it neither opened nor bloomed well. In 1858 he came out with the tea rose ‘Ophelia’. These roses have long since vanished.