Tea Rose

Just putting those two words together is enough to evoke rather nostalgic images, isn't it? You might expect to find them printed  on the base of a patterned bone china tea cup or along the selvedge of a roll of chintz furnishing fabric.  Something rather English, very 'roses round the cottage door' about the idea of tea roses.

It's not merely  designers' whimsy as the term refers to a category of roses which has a history which starts in Asia and is founded on the fact that English people simultaneously developed a taste for tea and a passion for new and previously unknown plants and cultivars for their gardens.
"It seems that the early Tea roses as well as the Chinas arrived in ships of the East India Company, which were of course primarily concerned with the transporting of tea, but since a small part of their cargo yielded another new race of roses, it is possible that this, coupled with their unusual scent, led to the term 'Tea-scented rose'..." 
From Beales, Peter  'Classic Roses'.

 This rose is Cecile Brunner.  As any rose aficionado would probably point out, this is not strictly speaking classed as a tea rose, it is however a China rose so its ancestry still shares something of the same romantic history.  To me, it is the first rose I can remember and I loved it. By the time I was old enough to toddle around a garden, we were living on a farm hundreds of miles from where I was born.  It had  a house where no garden had been before. Initial priority was given to planting vegetables and establishing fruit trees, with a few annual flowers and hedges to protect everything from marauding rabbits and poultry. It was several years  before my mother planted roses. In the meantime, like her, I got to enjoy them in her sister's and  her mother's gardens during summer holidays.  That Cecile Brunner shade of pale pink was my second most favourite colour then; it  is such a  charmingly dainty flower and although it there are a few thorns on the branches, the flower stems are smooth - all very child friendly. It is fragrant with a very distinctive, sweet, spicy note which if anything, has reminded me how powerfully memories can be evoked by our sense of smell.

 The year after I planted this rose here in my English  garden, I bent down to sniff the first flowers and I was stunned by how suddenly and vividly I was transported back miles (and decades). For a moment I was a four year old child standing in my aunt's garden holding a basket while she picked flowers. She chatted to me about the flowers and the posy she would make with them as a gift for a friend. She loved to make hand tied posies to give along with wishes for a happy birthday or a swift recovery. For me, she made dresses for my dolls and could snip out a string of paper dollies in an amazing instant. I remember though standing there in the garden agonized by the thought that it was very impolite to ask for presents but desperately wishing with all my heart that she would realise that one person who would just absolutely love to be the recipient of a posy of little pink roses was standing right beside her.