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| Rosa 'Sombreuil' 13 August 2026 |
The Rose Family – Robert Frost – 1928
The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose -
But were always a rose.
When I found
this poem I immediately thought of my Rosemary since she was the one who in
1991 gently pushed me to go to a Vancouver Rose Society meeting at the Van
Dusen Garden Flora Hall. I could now not live with roses in my little Kits garden.
Her name, to my ears, sounds even more beautiful – Rosamaría.
The name Rosemary comes from the Latin
phrase rosmarinus, meaning "dew of the sea" (ros meaning
"dew" and marinus meaning "of the sea"). In English, folk
etymology later reshaped the sound of the word to blend with the unrelated
personal names Rose and Mary.
The white
rose here is Rosa ‘Sombreuil’. It has a lovely scent, blooms for months and is
a climber.
Rosa ‘Sombreuil’ -1850 by the breeder
Français-André Robert. However, there is a modern controversy: the popular
large-flowered climbing rose widely sold as 'Sombreuil' in the United States
today is a different modern or 20th-century climber introduced around 1951 by
Roses of Yesterday and Today.