At Golf Juan reside the Nabonnands.

Paul, the last of the family[1], way up in the seventies, is not as active as he once was.
But Nabonnands have made rose history, and Paul remains today the faithful champion and lover of the Tea rose. However, he has had to surrender to the march of time and for economic reasons venture into other classes more in demand than the forgotten Tea rose.
It seems to me a sacrilege that the once-aristocratic Tea rose should be displaced by the "brilliant parvenus" (Francis Parkman) Hybrid Perpetuals even if the very best one, S. M. Gustave V, is the result of that "infidelity", as Nabonnand expressed it. As an apology, Nabonnand told me that King Gustave of Sweden, great lover of roses, comes often to see him while wintering at Nice and once deplored the hard climate of his homeland. On Nabonnand's suggestion the king opened a competition for an everblooming rose winter hardy in Sweden. To please his royal client, Nabonnand made some crosses on Frau Karl Druschki and, much to his surprise, won the prize, hence the name of the rose. The work of the Nabonnands with Tea roses has been extremely prolific, but most of those varieties are extinct today. The catalogue of the Roseraie de l'Hay, published in 1906, lists 1081 Tea varieties, of which 147 are credited to the Nabonnands.
Probably a few more have come since then. I have mentioned the cosmopolitan winter colony. It is interesting to see its influence on Nabonnand's Tea-rose names: Reine Emma des Pays Bas, General Schablikine, Natascha Metchensky, Archiduc Joseph, Duchesse de Vallombrosa, Duchess of Edinburgh, General Gallieni, Grande Duchesse Anastasie, Imperatrice Maria Feodorovna, Princesse Vera, Princesse Radziwill, etc. Few of these roses have survived their sponsors. Of the more than eleven hundred Tea varieties (or names) which saw the light, barely fifty can be found today and only in "depositories" or amateur collections.

 

The name of Nabonnand will also remain attached to the Gigantea (Collett) strain, although his research work in that line does not reach the extent of what Father Schoener has done in California. From what I have seen of the Gigantea hybrids along the Mediterranean coast, our own Southern states should be populated with those glorious roses. Speaking of Gigantea, this species blooms long before any other type and since I saw no greenhouse where he could force other kinds to bloom at the same time, I asked Nabonnand how he procured pollen for his Gigantea crosses. He told me that he collected and preserved pollen from the previous autumn.
Asking Pernet-Ducher about that, he confirmed that he had successfully used pollen several

months old. I tried it as an experiment but did not get as many hips as with fresh pollen.

 

Paul Nabonnand is a horticultural genius and, being a genius, he is modest. Nabonnand was commissioned by the French government to hybridize and improve coconut, date and ornamental palm trees for the French colonies, in which work he has been highly successful. Wholesale growers on the coast and florists in Paris owe Nabonnand much gratitude for his work with mimosas, the culture of which is now a great source of revenue for the region. Tourists remember the Riviera for the brilliant colors of pelargoniums covering walls and roadsides. Nabonnand was a factor in the improvement and multiplicity of these gorgeous flowers.

 

I have been familiar with the Riviera (one of my sisters lives in Nice) for many years and I have seen the Tea rose slide gradually from the height of popularity to complete oblivion, the lovely climbing Teas replaced, horribile dictu, by the coarser Wichuraiana hybrids. Dorothy Perkins and American Pillar reign undisputed, and I must confess that I have never seen them more beautiful. I investigated the reason for their planting, and the owner of a large estate told me: "We move North soon after the first rose blooming and we do not care how roses perform during our absence. These hardy types give a much more gorgeous display while we are here than Tea roses." After a long summer rest Dorothy Perkins generally blooms again in

late autumn.

 

Here is an observation which may indicate why a given rose may be a success at one place and fail a short distance away. Taking Nice as the main point, palms are fair at Nice but decline in size and apparent happiness as we travel west; they improve, however, as we travel east until they reach a maximum of beauty, [...]

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