Guest Article from Liz Kerr:
This is Roseweek in Victoria - from October 30 to November 3. During this week there is a major Rose Conference in Melbourne, organised by the Rose Society of Victoria. Another major event is the Melbourne Cup, the "horse race that stops a nation", always run at Flemington on the first Tuesday in November.
There are more than 20,000 roses now planted at the Flemington Racecourse (up from about 6,000 bushes last year) and the organisers are hoping for a spectacular display on 2 November.
There is a strong connection between the horse race and roses. The best-known of all Australian rose breeders was Alister Clark, who at one stage was the Chairman of the Victorian Racing Club. He maintained an intense interest in horse racing throughout his life and the Alister Clark Stakes is still run every year. As a child coming from a family totally uninterested in gardening, even I knew the names 'Lorraine Lee' and 'Black Boy', two of the roses he bred. He also bred daffodils.
Alister Clark was one of the few breeders to use Rosa gigantea in his programme. This climbs to more than 10 metres through the trees in its home in the Himalayas, but is little-used because it is not cold-tolerant; not a problem here in Australia. During his lifetime he bred hundreds of roses and released more than 120 varieties. He died in 1949 and during the years since his death many of these became lost to cultivation. Sadly, this is a common occurrence with many cultivated plants; the problem is not that the plants themselves are of no value, but fashions change, labels are lost, growers and owners die and there is no-one left to identify them.
A number of years ago, Susan Irvine, a noted Australian rosarian and garden writer, set about re-discovering Alister Clark's roses. She has written several books. In her two books "Garden of a thousand roses" and "Hillside of roses" she describes the gardens she created incorporating Alister Clark roses.
At that time she held the Ornamental Plants Collections Association's (OPCA) Collection of Alister Clark roses. As she points out, her gardens were both quite large and crammed with plants (many of them not roses), but when she discovered a new Alister Clark rose the priority was to fit it into the garden because of the imperative of the Collection.
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