Hi, Ann Helen. I'm glad I was able to reach you. I hope you enjoy your Reine des Violettes and Basye's Blueberry! Your garden is going to smell great with those two. Your email setup is probably fine; I just hit reply, which maybe can't be done with an email originating from GardenWeb. Hello, Ingrid. Glad RdV lives at your place. Mine gets late afternoon shade too. It seems to work perfectly for that rose during our crazy hot summers. Thank you for bumping up the post, harborrose! That was no hi-jack, Lynn, thanks for your post. Wow, nice to have 3 RdV's in the garden. Lucky you. Randy

Ok, so I have (hopefully) mastered the science of posting pictures and (hopefully) the following are my picture comparisons of the two versions of Marie Pavie. The first two are the Chamblee MP's: Another Chamblee's picture: The following are shots of the flowers of the Vintage version: Another Vintage: And another Vintage: The Vintage flowers are just a bit fuller and rounder, to my eye at least. I do love Celestialrose's pictures of her plant - the flowers are very cute! Lou - I discovered Abelia a year or two ago and I can vouch for it's wonderfulness! I have Edward Goucher (beautiful dark green with pink flowers but a large plant), Silver Anniversary (smaller shrub) and Kaleidescope (can never remember how to spell that). I almost ordered the Rose Canyon this year........

harborrose, I would love to see your slides on youtube. I have been asked to write an article about polyanthas for our rose sociey quarterly, probably for lack of a better candidate because I know very little about them. It will have to be a very theoretical article because polyanthas are quite uncommon in Sweden. I grow only three myself, Marie Pavie, Katharina Zeimet and Mevrouw Nathalie Nypels plus I used to have The Fairy 25 years ago. I remember seeing a small collection of polys in a manor house garden many years ago. I'ts a museum so I mailed the head gardener for a list of the polyanthas still in the garden. I was shocked and sad to see the short list of remaining varieties: 'Mrs R M Finch', 'Marie Pavie', 'Yvonne Rabier', 'Schneewittchen', 'Orange Triumph'. I have noted all the polyanthas mentioned in this thread with mounting envy and will definitely try to find some of them. taoseeker, I believe it has been decided by gene mapping that Katharina Zeimet and Old Schneewittchen are one and the same in commerce in Scandinavia.

Mmmmm...that is a gorgeous photo, Remy! Nick, I find it interesting that you detect a hint of myrrh in MP. Isn't there a type of myrrh fragrance that descends from Rosa arvensis (see my excerpt from "In Search of Lost Roses" in my original post on this thread)? I seem to recall that the old rambler 'Ayrshire Splendens' was often described as having a pronounced myrrh fragrance. I did not detect even the slightest hint of myrrh in the flowers on the MP in my friend's garden. Her plant looked much Remy's, with perhaps a few more petals to each blossom, or maybe not. I am usually *very* sensitive to myrrh fragrance in roses since I find it to be singularly unpleasant. Instead, to my nose, she smells like pure sweet musk, much like the older Noisette roses. I wonder how many clones of this rose are actually in circulation right now. It seems like MP as she currently stands might better be thought of as a Noisette or hybrid Noisette or hybrid ? rather than as a Polyantha. This evening I was rereading Judyth A. McLeod's engaging little volume about old roses in Australia called "Our Heritage of Old Roses" and found the following excerpt in reference to 'Blush Noisette': "One suspects that more than one seedling was raised by Phillipe Noisette, because Ethelyn Emery Keays described a rose in Calvert County, Maryland, which could be dated back to the Civil War. Called locally 'Faded Pink Monthly', this sweetly named rose was described as being very lovely, of less than half the stature of 'Blush Noisette' but in all other aspects a rose that might have sat for Redouté's famous portrait of its more famous relative. It could of course have been a dwarf sport from 'Blush Noisette', but it is only too likely that Phillipe raised a batch of seedling rather than one" (from pages 65-66 of the 1989 hardcover edition). Could MP simply be an old, lost Noisette that was renamed and reintroduced in 1888 as 'Marie Pavié' and classed as a Polyantha to appeal to a wider general audience hungry for novelty?