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Marchioness of Lodonderry, HP. (Richmond, Va.:) My plant came from the old Roses of Today and Yesterday firm. I also saw the plant in bloom at the Roseraie de l'Haye in Paris. The Parisian rose was like the old, occasional comments about it by books and journals, which can be read in Brent Dickerson's invaluable "The Old Rose Advisor," p.140. There the rose was a greyish white, or what I called "dead man's body white," very unpleasant, as several of the. The RT&Y rose was various shades of whitish pink, as in many of the photos in HMF. Dickerson's book also quotes some rave reviews of Mof L being "ivory white," "the best white rose we have," and so on. I would only send a bouquet of these roses to a funeral.
Somewhere, maybe in a comment by Dickerson in another source (I'm not sure), someone said that it really is the HT Sachsengruess, Hoyer & Klemm, 1913. Dickerson has very little to say on the rose of this name (p.286) except that it was bred from Frau Karl Druschke (HP) & Mme Jules Gravereaux (Cl.).
I grew this rose in an era when I sprayed with systemic fungicide, watered, & also I recall planting some sort of large fish under it, probably an over-welcome halibut from a local shop, sufficiently deep that it didn't grow in putrid corruption, My rose from RY&T in about 3 years becane a 6' bush, well foliaged, large-leaved, which had plenty of room to grow. In its 3rd year it evidently found the halibut. I took apx. 65 giant blooms from the bush, palm-size, managing to make slides of groups of those I picked while it grew more. One bloom won Queen of Show at the Richmond Rose Soc. exhibition as "Marchioness of Londonderry, HP," & several members asked me where I'd got it. Now, though it was a very lovely creature, do remember that rose societies love to give prizes to roses that are large, and roses that are pink. This qualified on both counts.
The bush never performed with such zeal again, and I swear that it bloomed itself to death that year, but probably through my campaign against poisononing myself in interest of keeping my wife happy, I stopped spraying.
In other words, if you belong to one of those Rose Societies where old men spin away the hour discussing what ultra-deadly poisons to spray against spider mites now that their previous poisons have killed off all the insects that preyed on them, you will like this rose. I hardly know where to tell you to go to buy it, but the photos in HMF have a vague, though more meagre, resemblance to the lovely Fausse Marchioness and maybe once came from the same source as mine. She won me a very large glass vase engraved with various vining flowers in the American taste, and of course the ribbon.
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