"Grandma might have been thinking this way." (Digit) Digit, I think that you may have hit on something here. We grow vegetables primarily for leisure. The vegetables we produce are not essential to our survival, so we place undue emphasis on aesthetic qualities such as appearance... and we grow fewer of them. Our ancestors, on the other hand, had a much closer relationship with the vegetables that they grew... no vegetables = no food. With survival at stake, they would have learned many techniques to grow and preserve their vegetables... and to save seed successfully. Their plantings were large scale, with greater emphasis on productivity - the precursor to modern agriculture. However, they may not have segregated their varieties to the extent that we do today. After all, they were less concerned about the shape & color (and even flavor) of what they grew, than they were of the other traits - earliness, drought hardiness, yield, resistance to disease, and storage life / ease of preservation. They might have only grown one "tried and true" variety of many vegetables, or they might have grown a mixture (with or without segregation). A great deal of amateur breeding took place, gradually incorporating desired traits into family lines... hence, heirlooms. As experienced farmers, they would have selected for seed the plants that possessed the traits they desired; so they were keen observers, who knew what to watch for. That knowledge would have been passed down, along with other survival lore such as hunting & trapping, animal husbandry, tanning, drying meat, etc. Sadly, with the dawning of the industrial age, that unbroken line of knowledge was severed. We may have a world of information at our collective fingertips... but for the population at large, much of the knowledge of self-sufficiency is now beyond reach, forgotten. We are the weaker for it, were our technology to ever fail us.

I vote for Hansa as well. Mine came from my grandparents' farm in rural western Mass, on land they bought and built on during WW I. Hansa was introduced in 1905; one of my aunts remembers my grandmother saying it was a special gift to her as a new neighbor. I also have Roseraie de l'haye, and I think it is a blowsier, more loosely extravagent bloom than Hansa. Is it very fragrant, with a clove=y edge? R de l'haye is fragrant, but sweeter.

When I was a small child...until I was about 5 years old...my grandmother lived in the house my great-great grandfather built between the beach and the marsh of the Southern Maine coast. He'd bought a house, reversed the plans, and added a whole extra house worth of a wing. One side faced the ocean, and one, the marsh. They made it into what would now be called a bed and breakfast, I guess, and their guests were hunters in the Fall and bathers in the Summer. Oh, and they served 3 meals and tea every day. They being my great-great grandma and her maid/girl Friday (and my grandma, once she got old enough to help). I don't know what their average guest load was, but I do remember seeing a picture that had been used as an advertising picture post card with the crowd of guests out in front of the Woodbine Cottage...there had to be at least 30 people there. I remember my grandmother telling us how she used to have the chore of picking the meat out of the lobsters. The skin on her hands would turn red, start cracking and sometimes bleed (I don't know why lobster shells do this, but having picked the meat out of 3 at one point, I can believe her). This, so they could put big bowls of lobster meat down the middle of the table for the guests to help themselves. See, lobster at that time was dirt cheap, and for my great-great grandfather, who had his own boat and traps, an economical way to stretch the food costs associated with feeding the guests. My poor grandma still got a flash of anger in her eyes some 50 years later, when she related how the guests would put their cigars out in the bowls containing the remaining lobster when they were done with dinner. They baked all their own bread, made all their own pies and sweets, in fact, cooked everything from scratch...and a far more difficult scratch than people of our generation cook from, if they do! On a WOOD stove/oven. Without a REFRIGERATOR, let alone a dishwasher. In the Winter, they shut down the entire ocean-side wing, and lived in the original house to save heat. I have only the hazy memories of a young child, but I remember that kitchen as small. And as y'all know, generally the things of childhood are usually smaller when visited as an adult. Naturally, by the time my grandma was mistress of that kitchen, with grandchildren underfoot, more modern appliances had been installed. But there was still a narrow, dark stairway going down into a cellar in one corner (I assume that was the root cellar) and a small closet with a toilet in it in the other corner. I don't know what the use of it was before they put a toilet in, maybe a pantry? There was a kitchen table, where we ate, and a window seat (probably a storage chest) where my brother was bedded down after he had his tonsils out, so that he could eat with the family (he got ICE CREAM while I had to eat boring old chicken, potatoes and peas :( Funny the things you remember). With about 6 people around the table, I do remember my grandma having to sidle around the table to serve things, which paints a picture of how small the kitchen was. I have lived with and cooked in a number of small kitchens in my life. The smallest was in a condo I rented, which was called a "junior one bedroom", meaning that it was a studio apartment with a small bedroom tacked on. I could literally stand at the stove stirring a soup, reach over to the sink on my left for some water to add if I'd let it boil down too far, and pivot on one foot to open the fridge behind me to pour myself a glass of wine to sip while I cooked. And yet, you do learn to make do with what you have, if you like to eat well. I cooked a 5 course Japanese dinner for 6 people once in that tiny kitchen. You just learn to prep all your ingredients before you start actually cooking, and you sit down and plan your timing carefully before you begin, picking dishes that can be made ahead or partially ahead, using the minimum of last minute pots, pans and dishes. Yes, our grandmas and great grandmas generally made simpler dishes than we might now, but those simpler dishes were more difficult then. No (or very few) convenience foods, prepackaged mixes or instant ingredients. Recipes weren't as precise either, they couldn't be, because ingredients, measurements and temperatures weren't all that precise either! I shudder to think of trying to bake a loaf of bread or a pie in an oven heated with wood or coal!

I got mine from all different sources. BULL'S EYE came from Edmunds. EYES FOR YOU I got from Burlington Roses. EYES ON ME came from Lowes. EYECONIC MELON LEMONADE from Regans. They carry all the "Eyeconic" series ones. And got my BLUE FOR YOU from Cliff back when he first opened EuroDesert Roses. Not sure who has BFY anymore tho. Disease resistance is generally pretty good on all of them, but this yr has been such a weird, wet and cold one that they all have been hit with black spot.