Native Texas Nursery

A Tale of Two Roses

There’s a picture I first saw probably eighteen years ago, and it has stuck in my memory ever since.  After some internet searching, I found the picture again and tacked it to the wall here at the nursery, where it stayed for about a month, which seems to be the time limit for any picture to stay tacked up there.  Martha Gonzales stands next to ‘Martha Gonzales’.  Martha looks straight at the camera from behind large glasses, her arms straight down at her sides.  ‘Martha’ reaches a couple of branches out from its otherwise compact form.  Martha is wearing a light blue, quilted housecoat and scuffed, serious-looking black shoes.  ‘Martha’ is nestled at the corner of a small house, the small leaves showing up against the weathered white siding.  This is Martha Gonzales, an elderly woman standing in front of her house in Navasota, Texas, and ‘Martha Gonzales’, a tough-as-nails little red China rose.  This is no nonsense.  This is getting stuff done, never mind drought or freeze, or fancy shoes, or regularly applied compost, or newly painted siding. 

Martha Gonzales

Pam Puryear and Joe Woodward were out ‘rose rustling’ in the early eighties and saw the dark red blooms of a sturdy looking, small rosebush, as well as the roses ‘Old Blush’ and ‘Mrs. Dudley Cross’.  The homeowner, Mrs. Gonzales, gave them permission to take cuttings, and over the next year, the merits of  the small red rose became obvious.  When Pam went back a year later, it looked like the house was vacant, the rose was gone, and she assumed Martha Gonzales had passed away.  That was the end of the story for nearly fifteen years, until 1999.  That was when Pam Puryear and the other ‘rose rustlers’ found out, through the granddaughter of Martha Gonzales, that the woman in the picture, the woman who originally gave them the cutting of their hardy little red China rose, was still alive!  She passed away a year later, knowing just how famous that little rose had become.  ‘Martha Gonzales’, found by chance in a yard in Navasota, is now a landscape staple and can be found in yards throughout the South.  This is the kind of history you get with Antique roses. 



'Martha Gonzales'



‘Martha Gonzales’ is listed as being introduced in 1984.  By way of comparison, another rose introduced in 1984 is ‘Dolly Parton’.  ‘Dolly Parton’ was named after Dolly Parton because she’s… Dolly Parton.  That’s the story.  That’s it.  There's nothing more to it.  Well, she did sing a song with Kenny Rogers.  So, there is that. 

Dolly Parton

That’s the beauty of Antique roses.  That, and, you know, their beauty.  Antiques make great landscape elements.  Most of them are full, vigorous shrubs that happen to bloom repeatedly without pruning, fertilizing, or fuss.  But aside from that, they have a back-story.  China roses, for example, have histories that go back at least to the early eighteenth century, when British explorers “found” them in Chinese gardens.  The fact is, Chinese gardeners had been growing those roses for centuries before the explorers showed up.  In fact, there are references to Chinese gardeners growing roses as early as the eleventh century B.C.  But it was nice of them to let the British think they had discovered them, wasn’t it? 

The long history of Antique roses isn’t necessarily just wrapped up in dry stories about international trade and guys with really impressive sideburns sneaking roses out of China.  

Ambrose Burnside and his intimidating chops

These long-lived roses lend themselves to involvement in personal stories, too.  There are stories about people like Pam Puryear, driving past little, overgrown houses in Texas and scanning the yard for roses.  There are stories about roses that were found, lost, and then found again.  There’s my story of how I met my wife at the Antique Rose Emporium.  There are stories about roses surviving the floods of hurricane Katrina.  There’s the story of a woman with a neglected rose, whose picture wound up on a nursery wall thirty years later. 

I went to work for the Antique Rose Emporium in Brenham when I was sixteen, and I’ve had Antique roses around me since then.  Even during my nomadic years, when I lived in various apartments, I always had a couple of Antique roses in pots on the patio.  When my wife and I bought an old farmhouse to fix up, one of the first things we did was plant a ‘Cramoisi Superieur’ rose in the front yard, a rose that she grew from a cutting.  

'Cramoisi Superieur'

I’m sure there are other plants that have this kind of legacy, these kinds of stories, but I’ve just never felt the need to carry, for example, a pansy around with me from one apartment to the next.