Human Flower Project

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Looking for Jack Harkness

At long last, and gratefully, we hear from John Levett, remembering rosarian Jack Harkness. Photographer, writer, gardener, John lives in Cambridge, England. Nobody else could put Old Blush and Zinedine Zidane together. Thanks, John.  We’ve been missing you.

Lawrence Johnston
Photos: J. Levett

By John Levett

In September 1971 I started teaching Primary Ed. I lived in South London & taught twenty miles away on a direct route through central London. I motorcycled to work there & back twice daily. One morning the following February I came off the bike at Hyde Park Corner in rush hour. Lying there I could just make out a chalked message on the asphalt: Get out of London. You’re too young to die. Three months later I decamped with dog, two cats, mother & ten year’s back editions of Motorcycle Mechanics to the little-known-history-passed-us-by market town of Hitchin in Hertfordshire. Still twenty miles each way to work but only hay wains & pipe-chomping peasant poets to negotiate.

That Summer of 1972 was the Summer of Watergate, the national dock strike, Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik, the birth of Zinedine Zidane & the death of J. Edgar Hoover. And the Hitchin Horticultural Show at Harkness Rose Gardens. On the Sunday (or was it still Saturdays in those days?) afternoon that Stan Smith squeezed past Ilie Nastase at Wimbledon, mum & I headed up the hill out of Hitchin to Jack Harkness’s sizeable plot. That afternoon mum decided it was time to grow a rose garden. So we did.

But that’s not the point of all this. So here’s the point. I was in Borders a few days ago, pushing through the drop-outs, Beats, hawkers, peddlers, scavengers, bearded Cubans & still-drunk Kerouacs that live there these days, looking for Gardening in which I might just find a reissue of Roger Phillips & Martin Rix’s In Search of the Rose which a friend has but it’s not worth serving time for. No joy. Never mind. I’ll stay awhile & browse, I almost said. So, pushing aside the Starbucks beakers & a half-gorged panini (why else would you go to a bookshop these days?) I looked for what’s new in rose books this century.

Nothing. Nothing it seems except the quality & size of the snaps which are as ‘in yer face’ as Beyonce & the aforementioned Zinedine Zidane. I was looking for literature wot you read. Words & knowledge; history & experience; nouse & know-how; dirt under the fingernails & grubby knees. I was looking for the double-barrelled, the Sackville-Wests, the never-go-out-without-a-button-hole, the Graham Stuart Thomases. The Jack Harknesses.

Which brings me to 1978 & Jack’s Roses. I think, maybe, that it wouldn’t get past the publisher’s runner these days. Written by Jack, mostly-out-of-focus front cover by Jack’s son Peter, drawings & snaps by Betty. It’s a book written by more than a rose breeder & grower; it’s by someone steeped in roses, their history & his family’s history. Someone who knows roses so intimately that his guess of the parentage of a hybrid is as good as an historian’s from Kew. Not just the history of the famous, Peace, Ena Harkness, Old Blush but the obscure & opportunistic, Richmond, Marquise de Sinéty, Duchesse de Brabant.

He wrote in the same tradition of those he quotes—Thomas Rivers, William Paul, Dean Hole, the Reverend Foster-Melliar (the history of the rose has much to do with ‘Reverends’) & Roy Shepherd. He’d spent a lot of time like his father & grandfather supping with the legendary rose breeders of France, Germany, the USA, New Zealand. In 1829 the botanist John Lindley had written of the rose H. persica: It resists cultivation in a remarkable manner...drought does not suit it, it does not thrive in wet; heat has no beneficial effect, cold no prejudicial influence; care does not improve it, neglect does not injure it. No matter, Jack brought it to Hitchin where it thrived & bred.

I didn’t read Jack’s book until Christmas of the following year. My mother had died that Autumn & I’d started on a new promotion in a new school; I’d maintained the garden but only just. Reading Roses set me on a whole new career. Gradually the lawn disappeared, trees were pollarded, borders widened; roses were squeezed, eked, shuffled, nudged, wedged into the available spaces. Not any old rose but those that referred to their history. They grew & prospered but my life changed & I left the garden behind. It’s pure coincidence but my moving day was the October day of the Great Storm of 1987; the morning after, there was little left.

I was left too, without a garden for the next ten years but kept coming back to Jack Harkness’s book. I blame him for my present ‘rain forest’ of a rose garden; he led me into wanting them all.

Albertine
“...with so much vigour as sometimes to outgrow its welcome” J. Harkness

R. californica: I shall have to speak up for this rose, for all my mentors decry it; even the almost infallible Graham Thomas, who dismisses it offhand as of no particular garden merit. Good enough for me.

Doncasterii: It was introduced in about 1930 by E. Doncaster of J. Burrell & Co., a nursery in Cambridge. I remember Mr Doncaster as a gentle old man from whom I had my first lessons in hybridizing. Every garden in Cambridge needs it.

Blanc Double de Coubert: This rose has been praised too much, for the reason that few double Rugosas have appeared to challenge it. I’ll have it anyway.

R. virginiana: One of the most handsome wild roses in the world; everything about it is right. In all probability, this was the first American rose to be taken to Europe & cultivated there. Welcome to my garden then.

R. foetida persiana: Captain Henry Wilock was chargé d’affaires in Therean until 2 September 1826, when his functions ceased. He was knighted in London on 30 June 1827. ‘Persion Yellow’ was received from him by the Horticultural Society’s garden in May 1836. If I can find it, I’ll find room for it.

Emily Gray: This rose does best for gardeners who neglect their pruning. I’ll change my habits just for you.

And so it went & so the forest grew. I’ve no doubt that the candy-coloured-super-macro-multi-decorated-mega-formatted volumes now on offer will enthuse & generate like Jack’s book; they just don’t have the same muck & smell around them. Jack Harkness died in 1994 & his book’s long been out of print. They still grow roses in Hitchin.