Roses for Victorian and Queen Anne Styled Architecture

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Roses for Victorian and  Queen Anne Styled Architecture

Inspiration

The front lawn of a typical Victorian or Queen Anne home was only broken by an occasional shade or ornamental tree. Clumps of shrubs were spaced periodically along the property line. Flowerbeds were intended to be viewed from windows, and planted with brilliantly colored annuals in the popular carpet bedding style. The centerpiece would be a circular bed of large subtropical plants castor bean in the center, followed by a ring of cannas.

            Tahitian Sunset, hybrid tea rose
Lawn as white as driven snow Cyprus black as e'er crow. Gloves as sweet as damask roses.  

                                                            The Winter's Tale  

Joseph's Coat Climber, Floribunda, Cl., Large-Flowered Climber. 

 The Charlatan, climbing rose

Of all the flowers, me thinks a rose is best.

                                         Two Noble Kinsman

Tiffany, hybrid tea rose

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

                                                                Romeo and Juliet

Chrysler Imperial, hybrid tea rose

At Christmas I no more desire a rose

Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled mirth; But like of each thing that in season grows. 

                                   Love's Labour's Lost

Pink Peace, hybrid tea rose 

Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell

Of different flowers in odour and in hue

Could make me any summer's story tell,

Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;

Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;

They were but sweet, but figures of delight,

Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.

Sonnet 98

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine: 
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight.
                           A Midsummer Night's Dream

Pope John Paul II, hybrid tea rose

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem 

For that sweet odour which doth in it live.

Sonnet 54

'Drop Dead Red'  Rose Floribunda. 

'Joseph’s Coat' Rose

'Julia Child' Floribunda yellow rose

What is a floribunda rose?

When looking up the word Floribunda in the dictionary you will find something such as this: New Latin, feminine of floribundus — flowering freely. Just as the name suggests, the floribunda rose is a beautiful bloom machine. She loves to bloom with clusters of beautiful blooms with several of her blooms in flower at one time. These wonderful rose bushes can put forth blooms that are much like those of the hybrid tea or can have flat or cup shaped blooms. The floribunda rose bushes make marvelous landscape plantings due to their typically lower and bushy form — and she loves to cover herself with clusters or sprays of blooms. Floribunda rose bushes are typically easier to care for as well as being very hardy. Floribundas are very popular largely because they seem to be continually in bloom during the season versus the hybrid tea, which blooms in cycles that spread out the periods of being in bloom by about six weeks. The floribunda rose bushes came about by crossing polyantha roses with hybrid tea rose bushes. Some of my favorite floribunda rose bushes are:

'Walking on Sunshine'  Floribunda Rose 

AARS winner 2011

Angel’s Face Grandiflora, Climbing Rose

Denver's Dream Minature Rose



Roulettii Minature Rose, Rosa chinensis minima

Dwarf Pink China

The polyantha rose bushes are usually smaller rose bushes than the floribunda rose bushes but are sturdy plants overall. The polyantha roses bloom in large clusters of small 1-inch (2.5 cm.) diameter blooms. The polyantha rose bushes are one of the parents of the floribunda rose bushes. The polyantha rose bush’s creation dates back to 1875 – France (bred in 1873 – France), the first bush being named Paquerette, which has beautiful clusters of white blooms. The polyantha rose bushes were born from the crossing of wild roses. One series of polyantha rose bushes features the names of the Seven Dwarfs. They are: Grumpy Rose (medium pink cluster blooms) Bashful Rose (pink blend cluster blooms) Doc Rose (medium pink cluster blooms) Sneezy Rose (deep pink to light red cluster blooms) Sleepy Rose (medium pink cluster blooms) Dopey Rose (medium red cluster blooms) Happy Rose (a truly cheery medium red cluster blooms) The Seven Dwarfs polyantha roses were introduced in 1954, 1955, and 1956. Some of my favorite polyantha rose bushes are: Margo’s Baby Rose The Fairy Rose China Doll Rose Cecile Brunner Rose Some of these are available as polyantha climbing rose bushes as well.

'Wing Dings'  Polyanthus Rose Introduced 2007

The Fairy Polyanthus Rose Introduced 1932

'The Fairy'  Polyanthus Rose Introduced 1932

'Walking on Sunshine'  Floribunda Rose 

AARS winner 2011

Souvenir de St. Anne Bourbon Rose 

Introduced before 1916

Souvenir de St. Anne Bourbon Rose 

introduced before 1916

Hybrid tea

American Rose Society ARS https://www.rose.org/

The American Rose Society is the largest single-plant society in the United States. Founded in 1892, it is a non-profit educational organization which promotes the growth and appreciation of the national flower of the United States -- the Rose. The ARS provides rose assistance for home gardeners, sponsors local rose societies throughout the U.S. and serves as the international registrar for roses throughout the world. ARS headquarters is located in Shreveport, Louisiana, at the Gardens of the American Rose Center, the Society's 118-acre park -- the nation's largest private garden dedicated to roses.
[From Roses of America, by Stephen Scanniello and Tania Bayard, p. 20:] During its early years, the American Rose Society was essentially a small association of commercial nurserymen. The man who transformed it into a dynamic organization of dedicated amateur as well as professional rose growers was J. Horace McFarland, president of the society from 1930-1932, who published the first American Rose Annual in 1916 and served as editor of the prestigious yearbook for nearly thirty years.

A comprehensive list of Roses and rose breeders: https://www.helpmefind.com/gardening/

Bourbon Roses

China Roses

Climbing Roses Damask Roses English Roses Floribunda Roses Grandiflora Roses Groundcover Roses Hybrid Tea Roses Miniature Roses Noisette Roses Polyantha Roses Rambling Roses Shrub Roses Tea Roses Wild Prairie Roses

The Beauty of Fieldstone, Prairies, and Heritage

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Fragile, yet Strong

CREATING a homey corner

If you grew up  surrounded by fieldstone houses and rolling hills but live in a different environment now, create a corner to celebrate your memories à la Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth lived in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, a classic Ameri

can farming community. Many of the buildings were created from the abundant fieldstone, heavily influenced by the Quaker population. Even though his most well known painting was Christina's World, created in Maine, his childhood was surrounded by fieldstone and verdant hills in Pennsylvania.

Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth 

Christina's World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth and one of the best-known American paintings of the middle 20th century. It is a tempera work done in a realist style, depicting a woman semi-reclining on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at a gray house on the horizon; a barn and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house. It is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of its permanent collection.

In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art bought the painting “Christina’s World” from the artist Andrew Wyeth for $1,800. Along with Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” and Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” it is one of MoMA’s most enduringly popular paintings. It has been more than 20 years since it was loaned out for special exhibitions. MoMA has denied recent requests from Wyeth museums (the Brandywine in Chadds Ford, Pa., and the Farnsworth in Rockland, Maine), saying that it is too fragile to travel.

I recently went to the newly renovated MoMA and discovered that “Christina’s World” has vanished. Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, said the museum has expanded its collection and had taken many works out of rotation, including “Christina’s World.” She said it would be brought back “within 2020.”

A museum can do as it chooses with its acquisitions. But “Christina’s World” is one of the most iconic American paintings of the 20th century. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” it has been reproduced on postage stamps, mugs, and posters. It is referenced in political commentary, TV, and movies, from “The Simpsons” to “Forrest Gump” to New Yorker cartoons, and memes, and has influenced countless artists, writers, poets, and songwriters. The painting will never be appreciated at a place like MoMA, where its broad appeal is confirmation that it’s little more than sentimental kitsch. Having fallen out of favor in the 1960s with the rise of Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, it is still, in certain highbrow circles, considered embarrassingly uncool.

Wyeth’s style has been largely misunderstood, as many art historians and critics now acknowledge. According to the art historian Wanda M. Corn, in a recent collection of critical and scholarly essays, “Rethinking Andrew Wyeth,” his style was forged in the 1930s and ’40s under the intertwined influences of American regionalism and figurative surrealism. (In his work you can see allusions to both the 19th-century Philadelphia realist painter Thomas Eakins and the 20th-century Belgian Surrealist artist Magritte.) Corn describes Wyeth’s style as a form of “metaphoric realism,” in which the ordinary is heightened to reveal qualities of fundamental human existence. “Magic!” Wyeth once said. “It’s what makes things sublime. It’s the difference between a picture that is profound art and just a painting of an object.”

I spent several years immersed in research on this topic. My 2017 novel “A Piece of the World” is based on the real-life relationship between Wyeth and the subject of this painting, Christina Olson, a disabled woman who spent her entire life in a farmhouse in rural Maine. I sat in front of the actual painting for hours at MoMA, listening to the enthused, perturbed, intrigued, dismissive, passionate comments of passersby from all over the globe. (Even when MoMA did display “Christina’s World,” it was stranded, without context, on a fifth-floor hallway between an escalator and the restrooms.)

Over the years, I came to believe that this painting is a Rorschach test, a magic trick, a sleight of hand. Alone in a sea of dry grass, Christina is the archetypal individual against a backdrop of nature, fully present in the moment and yet a haunting reminder of the immensity of time. She is paradoxically singular and representative, exposed and enigmatic, hardy and vulnerable. She is solitary but surrounded by the ghosts of her past. Like the house, like the landscape, she perseveres. As one curator has noted, “The painting is more a psychological landscape than a portrait, a portrayal of a state of mind rather than a place.”

“Christina’s World” doesn’t belong at MoMA, where it will never be appreciated. It belongs in a place that will do it justice, situating it in context with artists who influenced Wyeth and who, in turn, were influenced by him. Like two paintings with which Christina’s World is often grouped — James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s “Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1” (1871; commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother”) and Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” (1930) — “Christina’s World” exhibits traits we think of as distinctly American: rugged individualism and quiet strength, defiance in the face of obstacles, a kind of stubborn perseverance.

If you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you’ll be sure to glimpse John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X.” At the Louvre you’ll see the “Mona Lisa.” At the Whitney, Edward Hopper’s “A Woman in the Sun” is always on display. At MoMA you know you’re going to find those soup cans and that brilliant starry night. Christina, meanwhile, is hidden in storage.

Christina Baker Kline is the author of seven novels, including “Orphan Train.”

Grant Wood’s American Gothic is a world-famous painting, so much so that it is considered to be the most misappropriated painting in art history! But do you know its history and hidden meanings?

In what context was this painting created? Who are the two characters? Why does it have the title “American Gothic”? Analysis of a masterpiece

Grant Wood (1891 – 1942) was an American painter known for his rural Midwest representations. After growing up on a farm in Iowa, he trained in the visual arts and then went to study in Europe in the 1920s. This trip allowed him to discover Flemish paintings, the German Renaissance and the New Objectivity, an artistic movement that developed in Germany and succeeded Expressionism.

In 1930, he painted American Gothic, at the very beginning of the Great Depression, the economic crisis that followed the stock market crash of 1929 and plunged the American rural world into great poverty.

Who are the characters depicted in this painting?

Mystery surrounds the two figures in the painting: who are the woman with the worried look and the man with glasses staring at us? Are they a couple or friends? The man is older, so it is possible that we are looking at a father and his unmarried daughter.

The man is dressed in overalls but also in a black jacket, while the woman is wearing a piece of jewellery: they have made an effort to dress up, perhaps for the painter or to celebrate an important moment in their lives.

To create them, Grant Wood had his dentist Dr McKeeby and his sister Nan pose.

When the artist saw an unusual house in Iowa with an upper window with pointed arches usually found in churches, he was inspired to paint this picture with the kind of people he imagined would live inside.

The title ‘American Gothic’ is therefore a reference to the neo-Gothic architectural style of this house.

The fork is the third character in this painting. If you look carefully, you will see it on the man’s overalls, on his face and on the upper window of the house.

While a peasant would hold it down to avoid an accident, here it is facing the viewer. Several interpretations have been put forward: it could be a way of preventing the devil from entering the house, or it could be an evocation of sexuality considered perverse in the Midwestern society inherited from a certain puritanism.

Unless, by this gesture, the man is telling us “No entry” to protect the secrets kept in this house, whose closed curtains in the middle of the day suggest that something is being kept from us…

Another interpretation: this dark atmosphere, associated with the worried look of the woman dressed in a black dress, evokes the mourning of a certain idea of America, lost in the serious economic crisis of the 1930s.

Immediately after its premiere, the painting had a mixed reception. Iowans saw it as a caricature of rural life and were angry at being portrayed as ‘pinched, grimacing, fanatical puritans’. However, Grant Wood has always defended himself against this interpretation: for him the painting is a tribute to the rural population of the Midwest.

The artist’s sister, Nan Wood Graham, was made to look ugly by the painting, which led to a family dispute!

American Gothic was successful in the art world: exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the painting won a bronze medal and a $300 prize. The painting was featured in newspapers and quickly circulated throughout the country. In 1934, Time magazine ran a full-page reproduction of the painting, which helped make it famous.

The many diversions of American Gothic

Today American Gothic is a world-famous painting that has been hijacked in many ways. To name but a few, it has been used in the series Dexter, in the Disney cartoon Mulan, in The Simpsons, in the credits of Desperate Housewives and on the cover of Time in 1994.

The work is part of the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and it is therefore there that you should go from now on to be able to admire it!

John Chadd House, Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania
Built ca. 1725 by John Wyeth Jr.

The Process: An Accidental Discovery

After researching my genealogy, I found ancestors living in the Philly area. They built fieldstone houses and grist mills for processing their grain. As their families grew, many moved southward and westward to farm and support their families. 

Samuel P. Dixon House

Source: Mill Creek Hundred

Samuel Dixon stone barn

Source: Mill Creek Hundred

In Philadelphia, circa 1980's, I picked up two pencil sketches by Clark Goff  at an art show and framed them. They remind me of bygone eras. One is titled Elfreth's Alley and the other Washington's  Headquarters at Valley Forge. My husband grew up a few miles from Valley Forge, living in a fieldstone house, as did his grandfather. The pencil sketches represent the architecture popular when Quaker farmers were pulling the stones from their fields and using them for utilitarian functions such as houses, barns, and walls.  

Fran, John, and Lassie 
The Fieldstone House

A New Addition

After an inspiring post from a fellow garden writer, I trimmed a few of our native inland sea oats and placed the arching seeds in a heavy ceramic container. The vase reminds me of dry cracking earth or those fieldstones from our past. This "winter arrangement," is a parable about the strength and fragility of  gardener's struggles and the beauty and promise of a new spring.  

The simple arrangement is placed in the corner, allowing the sunlight to highlight the golden grains. The sweet yellow vase was painted by our daughter.  When I sat down to relax, I realized the corner was an Wyethesque tribute to our heritage.  This is my interpretation for the  "beauty," in Christina's World seen through Wyethe's eyes. Fragile, yet so strong.

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~ Grassroots Horticulture ~

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