This is a story about two women with a passion for heritage roses. The first is Tiffany Bignold, who fell in love with roses one autumn afternoon three years ago when she drove past an old farmhouse in Box Hill that was being demolished.
“I saw a rose growing on an old chimney and it just drew my attention – a glowing, soft golden rose.” Bignold found she couldn’t drive past it, searched out the site manager, dug out the rose and replanted it at home.
With help, she identified the rose as Lady Hillingdon, a tea rose developed in England as a bush form in 1910, then a climbing form in 1917. It’s famous for profuse, drooping apricot blooms that seem suffused with light. Bignold, keen to learn more, joined Heritage Roses in Australia.
The Rumsey Rose Garden in Parramatta Park is a living museum, preserving the glories of heritage roses.Credit:Robin Powell
The second woman is Heather Rumsey, a founding member of Heritage Roses in Australia. Rumsey and her husband, Roy, ran a specialist rose nursery for more than three decades in Dural, not far from Bignold’s home in Glenorie.
When the Rumseys closed the nursery in the late 1980s, Heather gave an ark of roses, two of every variety she had in the nursery, to Heritage Roses. Her gift came with a request that the roses form a public garden so that everyone could share in their beauty.
The garden was opened in Parramatta Park in August 1995. Heather had died earlier that year, so never saw visitors enjoying the Rumsey Rose Garden, where the climbing queens Lamarque, Albertine and Crepuscule, are draped in great curtains over mighty steel pergolas, and Mme Alfred Carriere climbs over the arches of a large central dome.
There are big beds of Rosa mutabilis and Duchesse du Brabant, two of the best roses for Sydney, and plenty of intriguing roses that are rarely seen, such the chestnut rose, Rosa roxburgii normalis, which has beautiful flaking bark in the winter, single pink flowers and hairy yellow hips in autumn.
Four months ago, the stories of the two women came together when Bignold took on the job of managing both the garden and the rest of Parramatta Park. Having developed a passion for gardening following her Box Hill revelation, she had followed her fine arts degree with a diploma of aboriculture.
Like other members of Heritage Roses, she had worked in the Rumsey Rose Garden on working bees, but taking on the role adds a new layer of responsibility for its development and preservation, and new opportunities for learning more about old roses.
“Lady Hillingdon started it all,” she says, “and working here has only deepened my passion for roses.”
The Rumsey Rose Garden in Parramatta Park is open every day and will be at its spring peak during the next few weeks.
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