It lies down the swale, on a partly shaded bank, and faces east. I like to see the sun hunt out the roses in the early dawn and kiss them. How they blush; and the dew on the petals look like tears! My apple orchard is just above, on the slope, and spreads over the knolls, all the way to Harding’s meadows. I dream o’ nights of the red apples I picked from these trees when a boy—it was half a hundred years ago, and there the trees are still—but tall and full. I was a schoolboy, and going home every evening I climbed up to the Spitzenburgs, in the tops of the trees, and sat there among the red apples, looking over the valley; and then I resolved, when a man, to have plenty of two things, apples and roses.

These two things are not only the finest things on earth, but they are first cousins in the vegetable world. The apple blossom is a single rose, and it is the model after which all roses have been made, and the best ones colored. Another cousin is the pear; and, in fact, the whole family constitutes a group that for beauty and value cannot be excelled. I have them all, and they are here in sight of each other. Cherries and plums go down the other side of the apple orchard, where they face the raspberries and the blackberries that follow the fences—a swath of thorns that few boys like to squeeze thru. Nor is this all; for in the mellow, moist soil of the swale, right alongside of the roses, is the happiest, prettiest, sweetest of all the members of this Rosaceæ family—my strawberries.

Any one who has less than fifty varieties of roses is full of self-denial—a useless quality in these days. If you wish to buy a selection you should take your pencil and mark off the catalog those you do not wish for. Gradually you will work your way down to half a hundred, possibly not less than a hundred. You will not strike off all the old-fashioned sorts, for almost as good as seeing the little mother once more is it to have a bunch of the cinnamon roses and the grass pinks that she loved so well and tended so carefully. Nearly as full of memory and peace are the Damson roses and the Cabbage rose. They shall never be banished from my home, and they shall always have a canny spot, where they may be happy and do their best.

The first potted rose that I ever saw was Sanguinea, blood-red, and always in blossom. I remember it best in the old, big brown kitchen, where, in winter, it lifted its head six feet from the window sill, up among the strings of dried apples. It was as full in December as in June, and the fragrance went far to make housework peaceful. [Mem., roses like sunshine, and they like the steam from the washing tub.] That rose will always be linked in memory to the sweet face of the one who tended it and me; and who governed us both as well. I have planted it on her grave. So memory links us together by many a curious and pleasant mnemonic. I also remember John Carey mainly by the John Hopper rose that grew by his door, and on the other side a Seckel pear tree—he and that rose were so much alike, big and hearty, both in bush and blossom, and as modest as wholesome. They both had thorns, I remember, but only for protection. Sanguinea was a China rose and John Hopper was a Hybrid Perpetual.

Now the best of the China class are Agrippina, and Malmaison, and Hermosa, and not many more; but of the Hybrid Perpetual one may collect about him a long list of magnificent roses. Among the best you will find American Beauty, the largest and sweetest and best of all the extremely hardy sorts. It is always in bloom, of exquisite form and wonderful sweetness. It is a great thing to be loved by everybody, even on the part of a rose, and it is a great thing to have the right sort of name and live up to it. But Clio is hardly one whit inferior to its rival, a rosy pink with a flower almost globular. Giant of Battles and John Hopper and Jubilee make a trio of scarlet, rose and crimson. Dinsmore is a crimson scarlet, and Lord Raglan I remember always for its honey odor, and General Jack because so many other roses try to beat it in its shining crimson and cannot do it. Margaret Dickson is the most superb of all the whites, Magna Charta of the violet crimsons, while Paul Neyron is the biggest and heartiest in all the list, and it is as sweet as it is big. I like Ulrich Brunner because it is always in bloom, giving us crimson flowers edged and flamed with scarlet. However, most of the Hardy Perpetuals blossom only once in the year, in spite of their name, and that will not do for a rose lover in these days. On the other hand, most of the Tea roses are too tender for our Northern gardens, and we must be careful in selecting them or we shall find the labor of protection quite too much for us.

We are, however, no longer compelled to make our choice between the classes named. About twenty years ago, from somewhere, appeared the first of a cross giving us the hardiness of the Perpetuals and the sweetness of the Teas—with continuous bloom. This marvel was called La France. It still stays with us, and it always will, and it has with it five other La Frances, of different colors. These six constitute a cluster truly magnificent. If you wish to hunt for them you must call for Duchess of Albany, a red rose; Augustine Guinoisseau, a white rose; Mad. Pernet Ducher, a yellow rose; the Striped La France, and the Climbing La France. These hybrid teas are nearly hardy, and many of them quite so in New England. It was a grand field to work in, and it has been worked to magnificent advantage. Nearly all of our finest new roses come under this head.

The glory of the very newest roses is Killarney, an Irish rose, as full of blarney as it is of sweetness—a Hybrid Tea, bringing the fresh cheeks of a half-wild Irish lassie, and the name go the historical lake where she is to be found. The bush is stout and of a deep bronze-green shade—a beauty without a bloom; but the buds are long and pointed and the flowers of enormous size and tea fragrance. They are to be had every day in the whole round year, and the bush is hardy as far North as an elm tree will grow. Another Irish gem is the J. B. Clark; color intense scarlet, clouded with a dark crimson, like the blush on a plum; while the growth is stout, and the green is nearly as dark bronze as Killarney. But the wonder is the size and substance of the blossom; sometimes seven inches in diameter and five inches in depth. It is the modern edition of the Cabbage rose.

Another group that I think would please the most fastidious might be made of Cherry Ripe, a wonderfully free flowering hybrid tea, with light rosy crimson flowers, almost globular, and fragrant as the best rose in the list. With this put Betty, another of the Irish roses, with a ruddy gold flower, of glorious form and deliciously perfumed. It is never out of bloom from June till November, and in Florida you may pick flowers of Betty all winter. Liberty is a deep crimson scarlet, and it has raised a sensation everywhere. You see, when we come to talk of roses, we soon use up all the superlatives in the English language. Anyhow, there is no rose that beats Liberty, taking it all round, for color and sweetness and strength of growth. The original plants of this rose cost $7,500; you can buy one now for twenty-five cents. I have never yet quite worshipped a rose, but I am willing to go down on my knees to admire Virginia Coxe, when it is a blaze of its dark velvety blossoms—as it almost always is. Then Helen Gould must be welcomed to make this group complete. It is one of the most satisfactory roses for everybody that was ever introduced. Its long-pointed buds are always breaking open into great, rosy pink flowers, as double as double can be. Perhaps we will not be content without adding The Queen, for this is the one of the best, if not the best, ever-blooming white rose in existence. It never gets tired of blooming, and its color is as pure as its odor, which fairly fills the air.

One may easily get into a tangle, after all this, or puzzle, if you prefer, over Safrano, Solfatere, Malmaison, Catherine Mermet, The Bride, and the Queen’s Scarlet—all old roses with a reputation and with friends who will contend for them all over the country. Then, among those not quite so old, we have Magnafrano, President Carnot, President Roosevelt, Augusta Victoria, Winnie Davis (a magnificent new rose named in honor of the daughter of the Confederacy); all noble flowers, but perhaps no better than Admiral Dewey and Admiral Schley. It was a capital thought to recognize noble characters in noble flowers. Queen Victoria recognized the compliment by graciously saying that she wished she were one-half as beautiful as her namesake. note Empress Eugenia is hardly behind the others, note and Frances E. Willard has pure snow-white buds and blossoms of the largest size and most perfect form, just as they ought to be.

But how easily one may be lost rambling among the roses; and even yet I have not named what the rose growers have come to call the Cochet Set—five superb ever-blooming Hybrid Teas.note Well, if I were compelled to be satisfied with just five roses, I would take these—one of pink, one snow-white, one red, one yellow, one crimson; and every one of them superb. Ah, well! Let me get away from these delightful companions, or my gossipy notes will find no end. I cannot tell you what my roses have done for me in the way of sweetening life, and possibly sweetening character. The charm of growing roses is their companionableness. I do not know why a robin, of all birds, seems to be nearest to us; nor why a rose, of all flowers, gets a warm place in our affections—but so it is. And that, I suppose, is why so many of them carry human names. Then, for giving away, a bunch of roses or a single rose is the sweetest, simplest and best of all tokens of love. And tomorrow there will be just as many more smiling at you from the bushes; you can be as generous as you please. But when you go to buy your roses, for I know that I have set you all agog for a bed of your own, do not accept the little slips of bushes, three or four inches high, with roots started, but always buy good, stout two-year-olds, and insist that they be grown on their own roots—as a rule. All these modern roses tax us if we desire to have them in perfection. They will not give us noble flowers on feeble wood. They are gross feeders and rarely cry enough. You should have a compost pile of old barn manure, and sod, and decomposed leaves, with a portion of coal ashes or sand, or both, to more completely make the soil friable.

This rosebed of mine is hid, away back from the roadways, along the slope of the Oriskany Valley. But if you wish to know what a rose wilderness is go to middle Florida—down there where you will get confused as to winter and summer, and can pick a Malmaison in January or a Queens’s Scarlet at any time. You go by a negro hut run all over with Cherokee roses, and sometimes a Bridesmaid twined with the other; cardinal birds flitting thru to clean them of insects—or is it to compare their scarlet breasts with the scarlet roses? You can do anything you please with the running sorts, for they never kill back—especially arching over gateways and bowering well-curbs and henhouses. Perhaps the hens do not lay any more eggs; but the chicks and roses make wonderfully pretty pictures. Huge pines overhead, with trunks sixty feet to the first limbs, and Bignonia golden-flowered, climbing up seventy-five feet in a season, and, in January, swinging out immense banners of yellow and green—altogether is it not fine! But even the roses must divide the law with the ever-present and ever-changing profusion of wild flowers.

I am proud of Florida; it is rightly named. Snow and ice do not touch its borders; frost rarely smells of its loquats and roses. The wing of a blizzard sometimes fans it gently, but zero is not in its vocabulary. Its lakes are just big enough for a farmer to own a whole one, and so he may grow shad in the shade of his own porches. I am not sure which member of the rose family I prefer in March; whether it be the peach, half-covered with blossoms and half with fruit; the plum, just tossing its infinite white petals to the Gulf breeze; the crimson strawberry, covering the ground; or Safrano and General Lee, covered with their great yellow and carmine buds. On the whole, I think it is the only one that I do not have here, as yet, the apple; the kingliest rose of them all; and for that I must go back to my New York valley.

And here, here between the orchards that half-cover the sloping hillsides, the rose has had the good judgment to blossom in June. It has had the pick of the months, and the month has had the pick of the flowers. It has left to May the shrubs, May with its occasional squalls of snow and its burst of summer sunshine. It has left to August the lilies; but in June, sweetest and completest of months, with its green meadows and its strawberries, the rose revels everywhere. It clambers over the rock piles and the stone fences, laughing with the soft breezes; it flings handfuls of odors into our sleeping rooms; it ozones the world. There are enough for the poorest, and enough for the children. Great bunches are on the table of the school ma’am, and, as I write, I catch inspiration from those that, climbing around my window, look in upon my work. How many poems have they written? Blessed June! You not only share with May the kingly apple blossom, but you have all to yourself the queenly rose.

Clinton, N. Y.