Push open the green door of Mottisfont's walled garden at midsummer and you plunge into a sea of roses. Not the gaudy roses of today, but the pink and crimson roses of yesterday, eulogised by the classical poets, painted by the Dutch masters, assiduously collected by the Empress Josephine and hybridised by the nurserymen of nineteenth-century France: rounded, petal-packed, drenched in fragrance and giving, in the main, one bountiful mid June to early July performance. There is nothing to equal them. Stephen Lacey, |