Ellen Ann Willmott


THE ELLEN WILLMOTT ROSE
Hybrid Tea 3ft-4ft
1935
'Dainty Bess x 'Lady Hillingdon'
One of our favourite old roses. This charming rose has been around a long time but still as popular as ever. Ellen Willmott produces single ruffled blooms in clusters of cream/yellow and laced with pink edges, plus quite exquisite stamens of claret. A strong healthy bush with leathery plum coloured foliage which darkens to green as it matures. Quite a stunning and interesting rose which should have a place in every rose lovers garden.
In cloudy and darker days the petals close over the attractive stamens, but as the sun appears the petals unfold like the wings on a butterfly. A repeat blooming variety which flowers through until the first frosts.Very attractive to bees and wildlife Highly Recommended. Fruity Fragrance.
Bred by William Archer and Daughter. Ashford. Kent. The Archer family produced some excellent single large flowered roses in the 1930s and this was one of their best.
This beautiful rose was named after the English horticulturist Miss Ellen Ann Willmott who was born in Middlesex in 1858. She was the eldest of three daughters, and the whole family were keen gardeners. In 1875 the family moved from Middlesex to Warley Place at Great Warley in Essex which was to become Ellen's lifelong home. Over the years the family developed Warley Place's gardens which allowed Ellen to indulge in her passion for collecting and cultivating plants. She inherited Warley Place when her father died and continued to develop the gardens and cultivated over 100,000 different species of plants.
She received quite a large inheritance when her godmother died which enabled her to buy properties in France and Italy where she developed further gardens and cultivated even more plants. Her new found wealth also allowed her to fund plant hunting expeditions in China and the Middle East where many new found species would be named after her. With so many properties to run, she at one time employed over 60 gardeners. She was often a difficult employer who would sack gardeners if anything was out of place or a weed popped up between her precious plants.
In 1914 she wrote The Genus Rosa which is a masterpiece and the culmination of a lifetimes' study of the species. It ranks with Redoute's Les Roses as one of the definitive and most beautiful works on roses and remains an important reference for rosarians today.
As time went on, however, the never-married Miss Willmott became very eccentric and cantankerous She was arrested for shop-lifting (the charges were eventually dropped), took to carrying a revolver in her handbag and booby-trapped her daffodil fields to deter bulb thieves. Always a prodigious spender she died penniless in 1934 and her estate, along with the garden where once 100,000 species from all over the world had been expertly cultivated, was sold off to pay her debts. Her beautiful home and garden were ultimately demolished. Today, her land is leased to the Essex Wildlife Trust and all traces of her magnificent garden are gone.

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