Lady Banks' Rose A Lady's Shady Rose

The world may have been having an irate look towards China, cursing her for COVID-19 virus, assertions in South China Sea, and her alleged expansionist policies and so on. Whether she really deserves these insinuations may be a matter of academic discussions; there however, is no denying to the fact that the old Dragon has bestowed the world with things beautiful enough to capture anybody's attention

-  Rajshekhar Pant.

One of the most unusual varieties of creeper roses-which may go as high as 50 feet, cover an area of 5000 square feet with the girth of its main trunk as enormous as 14 feet-is a unique gift from China to the rest of the world. Now commonly known as Lady Banks' Rose, it was originally grown over the centuries in the central and western provinces of China. Provinces of Gansu, Henan, Yunnan, Sichuan and Hubei happened to be its home. Way back in the first decade of the nineteenth century William Kerr, a Scottish plant collector, was sent to China for the first time by Sir Joseph Banks, an eighteenth-century botanist from England, for a massive plant hunt. A veteran of seafaring with Captain Cook, Sir Joseph was the person who introduced the western world with eucalyptus and advised the then King George III to establish the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. William Kerr sourced the original white variety of this rose from Fa Tee nursery in China to England where it was named after lady Dorothea Banks-the accomplished wife of Sir Joseph Banks, then the Director of Kew garden. Lady Banks was herself an avid collector and connoisseur obsessed with all things Chinese. Of her rich legacy