Retail rose nursery   Listing last updated on 08 Jul 2020.

Watsonville, California
United States

[From Onward and Upward in the Garden, by Katharine S. White, p.8-9:] The Tillotson catalogue are titled "Roses of Yesterday and Today" for the good reason that Will Tillotson, though he does grow and sell any rare or modern roses he happens to admire, specializes in old-fashioned roses. The catalogues are period pieces, too. The 1956 cover reproduces Sargent's "The Lady with the Rose," and 1955's is Fragonard's "The Swing," from the Frick Collection... The many uncolored photographs of roses are enchanting, and I never tire of Mr. Tillorson's prose. He is a quoter. Bits of wisdom or poetry scattered through the 1956 book range from Yuan Chungland, a Chinese sage of the sixteenth century, to Leigh Hunt and Browning...
Now and then, he stops carrying a rose he still thinks well of to make room for a new find -- in 1956 he threw out Lowell Thomas -- and sometimes he carries a rose he has not made up his mind about. I can't wait to learn whether in this year's catalogue he is still offering the rose called President Eisenhower; he has been wavering about it since 1954, when, he tells us, he wrote, "I will admit the rose is red, fragrant, forty-petalled, and is in nationally light supply for 1954. Beyond this I now refuse to go," adding that he was not yet ready to declare himself about either the rose or the man. This, he says, aroused a storm of protest, so in the summer of 1955 he wrote, "The C.W. [meaning the catalogue writer, Will Tillotson] has made up his mind about Pres. Eisenhower, the Rose (and the President of the U.S.)."
[From Onward and Upward in the Garden, by Katharine S. White, p. 17:] This report must have a melancholy addendum. I've just received the new Tillotson rose catalgoue (1957-58, two years in one). It is written and signed by Will Tillotson. But on the final pages of this second edition of the book there is a note to say that Mr. Tillotson died in England last summer, while he was there collecting roses for his California nursery. The business will be carried on by Mrs. Dorothy Stemler, who has long been active in it. In Will Tillotson's last list of stock, the rose 'President Eisenhower' has been dropped, without comment.
"Oh, gentle reader, forgive me if you are 'sleepy' or bored or annoyed. The tired catalog-writer has emptied his 'sack of adjectives at your feet.'" These words, reprinted from 1955's "Roses of Yesterday," are used as Will Tillotson's sing-off in the new book. He is a writer gardeners will miss.