Excerpt from Review of the British Roses: Especially Those of the North of England

In Britain, of late times, comparatively little attention has been paid to our indigenous Roses, and hardly anything has been written about them during the last thirty years. Rosa is one of those genera, where a difference in the point of view from which an author looks at the great species question, makes the widest difference in the number of species which he acknowledges. Where M. Grenier enumerates only 23 Roses for the whole of France, M. Deseglise describes or mentions 107 in his elaborate monograph of the French Roses, and M. Boreau, in the last edition of his Flora, gives 74 for the Central Departments only. In the present state of the literature of the subject, to write a monograph of the European Roses, to group the combinations of subordinate value into species which well-marked characters separate, to trace out the synonymy of these latter, and their distribution through the different countries, to clear up, or cast aside as impossible to be cleared up, the crowd of species which have been imperfectly described, would be a very laborious task. But a large proportion of the species of major, and apparently a larger proportion still, of those of minor value, do not extend their range into Britain, and for us to satisfy ourselves about our indigenous species, and their distribution within the limits of the island, does not seem to be very difficult of attainment, after what has been already done. What I propose to do in this paper is principally to narrate my own experience of the North of England Roses, and their distinctive characters.

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