Suzie and Kitty Carson’s rosebush bloomed early this year. It usually achieves its annual outburst in June. This year, perhaps a nod to climate change, it blossomed for Memorial Day.
It’s not your ordinary rosebush. According to these twin sisters, it has been blooming reliably for roughly 200 years.
To be precise, it is a very resilient and active descendent of the bush that emigrated with its owners on the long sea voyage from England to Virginia sometime in the early 1800s. For all we know, this might have been its bicentennial blooming. Since even Finding Your Roots likely can’t track the lineage of legacy rosebushes, it would be difficult to pin all this down.
What the Carsons do know is that the rosebush continued blooming until its tenders migrated from Virginia to Hebron, Indiana by ox cart (they still have the wide wooden yoke as a memento). Their forebears brought the rosebush along because they were farmers, and this was a specialized kind of bush, a hedge rose, which spreads to define, and defend, the dividing line between properties. If, as Robert Frost once wrote, good fences make good neighbors, so do hedge roses, which are decorative and pleasing to the eye, yet sufficiently thorny to deter invading critters, and hardy enough to endure long voyages and multiple transplantings.
Checking the Google app, this bush appears to be none other than a White Rose of York, one half of the famous War of the Roses, which are indeed used as hedges and valued for their hardiness. Josephine Carson, paternal grandmother of Suzie and Kitty, was the tale-teller who passed down the details of this rose’s journey. Josephine was also, once upon a time, president of the Oak Park-River Forest Garden Club (she specialized in growing irises).
When the family left farming behind, they took up backyard horticulture. Arriving in Oak Park, bush in hand, in 1910, Harvey and Josephine Carson nurtured and preserved their flowery legacy. Harvey, who played professional baseball and graduated from Northwestern, became a corporate lawyer at a firm with the appropriate name Gardner, Carter & Douglas. Josephine also attended Northwestern and taught Hebrew, Latin and Greek.
From there the story gets more complicated. Kitty and Suzie’s father, Bruce, and mother, Anne, moved into a house at 608 S. Kenilworth (bringing along a portion of the bush).
In the 1950s, Bruce moved to Arlington, Virginia and worked for the Securities & Exchange Commission during the Eisenhower Administration. But he soon grew homesick and moved back, this time to 811 Fair Oaks, and the fair roses came with. When Bruce and Anne divorced, however, the bloom was off this rose and the bush was left behind. But 25 years and two owners later, Suzie and Kitty’s brother Robert bought the house back, and the rosebush was still there.
Robert died in 1991 and his wife moved to Michigan. When Suzie met the next owner at the fitness center they both attended, she told him the story of the bush and asked if they could transplant a cutting to their home on the 1000 block of Grove. He never got back to her about it — until the day they were moving out.
Suzie called McAdams Landscaping and they transferred the bush to her garden. For the next three years it went dormant. On the day their dad died, Suzie said, the bush burst forth with blossoms.
In fact, it rapidly took over the backyard, so they moved a portion to the corner of the garden, surrounded by rocks, and the remainder was transported (not by ox cart) to a niece who lives in Michigan, where it continues to thrive.
As does the rosebush in the Carsons’ backyard.
This rosy ending is a testament to the hardiness of both rosebushes and families, not to mention the thread connecting them to England on this 250th anniversary of transplanting a nation to the New World. Stories of surviving and thriving resonate nicely in dark times when celebrating doesn’t come so naturally.
Lineage, though not an exact science, is as much about keeping a story alive as it is about tracing root systems. Suzie and Kitty, white-haired roses themselves, perhaps originally from York (a long, long way back) have done their fair share to sustain the family lineage and lore.
Which includes one very well-traveled rosebush.