(1965)  
 
My next choice, I think, would be a China rose. We were lucky in finding a healthy China rose beside the door into the garden. There were one of these roses in the first garden I remember, but we always called them "monthly" roses in those days. The flowers haven't the colour, the shape or the strong perfume of Albertine but they bloom in every month of the year. I have picked them at Christmas, and I enjoy the sight of the Tree in June when it is covered with blossoms. We prune our old rose drastically and spray it when it is attacked by greenfly, and it remains strong and healthy. I think it must have been grown by our back door for at least a hundred years. A friend in the next village was born in this house, and she is now over eighty and says that the rose was there when her parents came to the house a good many years before she was born.

[Mrs Fish's garden, East Lambrook Manor, is in Somerset in the south-west of England]