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Magazine Article
East Anglian Daily Times Suffolk June 2002
ROSES INCARNATE
Danaë Brook on a love affair with that prickly but often ravishing garden favourite.
Roses have become an addiction, a grand obsession, and a wonderful way to get my hands in the earth and connect with nature. I first fell in love with roses as a child, when my aunt, a gifted gardener, began teaching me all she knew.
Over the past two years I have read every book, old and new I can get hold of, and made it my specialist subject as a writer.
But I have amore pragmatic interest in these ravishing flowers than reading and writing about them. Two years ago my husband Robin Duthy and I started a small business called Country Roses as an experiment. We wanted to see whether we could create an organic and sustainable business at our home in the Dedham Vale. We are both journalists, our work is based in London, but we wanted to spend more time in the countryside, where we have a house on the borders of Suffolk and Essex.
We had a small paddock which had never been plagued by pesticides or herbicides and wanted to use it organically, and make it productive. For months we wondered how best to utilise this piece of completely chemical-free land. My mother and father-in-law had long ago tried mushroom farming, pig farming and marketing sweet peas – which were sent up to Covent Garden in beautifully tied little bunches, but did not prove a wild commercial success.
We both felt the space – where the mushroom beds used to be – was unexploited. It had massive potential, but how best to use it? And give something back to the land and perhaps to the village in the meantime? The solutions escaped us, until I suddenly realised that my late mother-in-law’s most successful gardening venture was not her sweet peas so much as her roses.
Every year the gardens produced a dazzling array of roses so opulent and gleaming, so heavily scented and exotic that people cam from miles around to see and smell them, and out friends from London would stagger back to the city after country weekends, laden with their unique burden.
We put two and two together. We were in a spot which exactly suited the growing of roses. Cants of Colchester, the ‘rose people’ chose to make their commercial rose gardens less than five miles away. Out beautiful little valley is warm, protected and soil is a clay mixture without being too heavy. At the bottom of the paddock is a tributary of the Stour and a lake created by Robin’s father.
Sun, moisture, shelter and just the right soil. A perfect microclimate for roses.
We decided too plant 500 roses in the spring of 2000 as a millennium experiment. With the help of our farmer, John Copsey, who obligingly lent us his skill and his tractor we turned over part of the grassy paddock, then rotivated several time and with the expert advice of Roger Pawsey of Cants, in March 2000 we planted twenty five different kinds of roses on a small patch in the corner of the paddock.
By the middle of June the roses were flowering as though they had been there for years.
Tentatively I took a bucketful up to London in the train, hoping they would survive the journey, and offered them to the florist Wild at Heart, on the Turquoise Island in Notting Hill Gate. They are not the bolt upright, non-smelling long-stemmed sentinels the Dutch specialise in growing under glass, they are the real thing, big blowsy richly perfumed beauties of the kind your grandmother had on her dressing table, or the great French painter Redoute brought to life on paper.
Luckily for us Wild at Heart adored them. There were difficult times, when our poor roses, shunted up to London in our own car, wilted once they hit6 the glaring Notting Hill pavements. But we soon found ways to protect and keep them cool. Dozens of other great florists like Paula Pryke (also a Suffolk girl, her mother lives in Long Melford), Phyllida at Harper and Tom’s, Absolute Flowers, Louise Woodhouse at Conran’s Mezzo and John Carter, scooped them up and used them for grand houses and parties. Fashion designer Amanda Wakeley took them; at one point huge armfuls were swept off to the shoemakers Gina by Louise Woodhouse because Victoria Beckham was expected in the shop; Lady Annabel Goldsmith used them at her annual London summer party, where Paula designs the flower displays. Photographers began to use them for sessions. Wild at Heart had given us the encouragement we needed. They bought the whole of that first bucket, and we haven’t looked back.
Going from strength to strength we quickly learned more about roses, their history, their uses (culinary as well as cosmetic) and more and more about what was needed in the market and which varieties people responded to best.
It was fascinating to discover what appealed to who and why. Most people like heavily scented and old fashioned. But everyone wanted something different. Young, modern, cutting edge florists and designers liked the bright pinks, deep magentas, flaming orange. The more traditional clients like the soft old rose colours, sprays and arching branches of the French and damask roses. I write for the Mail on Sunday and several of our editors and writers take them on a regular basis, so do our London neighbours in Notting Hill, who pick them up from our flat every Monday. Close friends, set designers, stylists, authors, painters, photographers, tend to like pale pinks against vivid magenta, apricot mixed with white, old fashioned cabbage roses, steep sprays of near-white virginal buds.
I learned quickly which last the longest, when is best to pick, how to keep them healthy, when to prune, and hoe and weed. We have tried and so far succeeded to keep chemicals at bay in both feeding and pest resistance, we encourage ladybirds, hoping they will enjoy the aphids; seaweed works well as a fertilizer and Chaz Nickson, our head gardener, with a degree from Otley Agricultural College, is constantly looking for new ways to manage organically the 2,000 roses now blooming in our rose field.
Our friend Annabel Gooch, a member of the Greene family (of Greene King the local brewers), often does flowers for local events, and used our roses for a huge Greene family get together in Norwich last summer. More and more local events organisers are getting to know about us and we are very keen to develop a more locally based clientele. London is wonderful, but I am sure there are many discerning hosts and hostesses in East Anglia who would appreciate having our roses for a family affair rather than cutting entirely from their own gardens.
We also have local people picking for us during the summer months, and are hoping to get students from Otley and Writtle who might benefit from the experience of working with our roses. As we grow, so there will be more opportunities for more people who live in our area to get paid work during the rose harvest season, between early June and late September.
When we began we almost called the business Rose Art, then decided against it as being too pretentious. I still think of roses as art though, and growing, cutting and arranging them as my form of painting.