Having grown roses for nigh on fifty years and having travelled to most countries where roses are grown, I've met untold numbers of enthusiastic amateurs both at home and abroad.

I'd heard of Nancy Steen and her roses long before I met her. The account reminded me of the roses of the Empress Josephine grown in her garden at Malmaison on the outskirts of Paris -such was the story told of her and the rose varieties she grew.

I was amazed to hear that in far away New Zealand such a collector, and such a collection existed, and frankly I wondered if this could be.

When she and her husband made their rose pilgrimage through Europe, they came to see my roses. I quickly realised that, in Mrs Steen, the Queen of Flowers had a most devoted subject; one whose life and love was dedicated to her service.

Small wonder that we travelled the world of roses together -the ancient and modern. She peeped into the future -at my new seedlings, I into the past -at her garden list of old roses. For me it was a memorable day. On parting she planted the idea that I should one day visit her garden in New Zealand, and like the good gardener that she is she planted well, for when the call of the sun was wooing me away from the English winter, the antipodes came to my mind and my first call in New Zealand was at Auckland where Nancy and David Steen welcomed me and my wife. I came, I saw, and was conquered by the beauty of the garden which she and her husband had created. All the varieties of Josephine's Garden are there and many others.

These roses of yesterday are treated in her story as intimate friends, and anecdote and incident are woven around them. Her journeys near and far in search of them are vividly described and her researches into the history of the rose and its development through the ages have been most thorough.

These descriptions of the many varieties she has grown come from a hand that has tended them, from an eye that has critically observed them, and a heart that has loved them.

Nancy Steen has gained much joy from her roses and this she communicates in the following pages. I have no doubt that many a reader will be inspired, as I have been, to grow more of the roses of yester-year, after reading such an enthralling story about them.

It is with real pleasure that I commend this book -so beautifully produced and illustrated -to rose-lovers the world over, and thank this rose-lover from Auckland, New Zealand, for allowing me to be associated with this most useful and informative work.

 

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See also Biography by Ann Chapman.

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