Tender But Tough: The Old Tea Roses

Tea roses may, not withstanding our magnificent Hybrid Teas, be taken as a supreme expression of what is most delicately beautiful. Refined in color, powerfully sweet, generous in bloom, neither what we say nor the pictures we see do them justice.
Ethelyn Emery Keays, Old Roses

In the 1930s and early 1940s, whenever Francis and Marjorie Lester left their nursery, which they had moved from Monterey to Watsonville in 1937, they were on a rescue mission. Sometimes for two-week stretches, they took to the backroads of California looking for the old roses so rapidly being dropped from catalogs and cultivation in favor of the hybrid tea roses. They were not alone in their desire to protect and preserve what was rapidly being lost. In the east, Mrs Ethelyn Emery Keays was collecting and identifying all the old roses she could find in Calvert County, Maryland, and writing a classic text about them: Old Roses (1935). Here in the West, the Lesters searched through old gardens, cemeteries, and the rewarding richness of the Mother Lode country.

That two hundred mile strip of land on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, where the gold rush had taken place after 1849, was a virtual pre...