(Sep 2021)  Page(s) 19.  Includes photo(s).
 
My husband Viru has hybridized with this species, and he has named and registered a seedling, a cross between ‘Rêve d’Or ’ and Rosa leschenaultiana as ‘Leschenault de la Tour’ to honor and memorialize the Frenchman who traversed our hills in the early 1800’s. It seemed singularly appropriate that this rose is doubly French, with ‘Reve d’Or,’ one of the best known of French roses as the seed parent, and Rosa leschenaultiana as the pollen parent.
The new rose hybrid is virtually a larger version of that famous white Noisette, ‘Lamarque’, again French. It bears beautiful globular, white flowers, displaying an exquisite medley of petals, illuminated by the light gold of the center, wafting a soft fragrance, and happily it is remontant. This climbing rose has elegant light green foliage and climbs easily 3 to 4 meters. I

(Sep 2021)  Page(s) 18.  Includes photo(s).
 
Ellen Willmott in “Genus Rosa” writes that R. leschenaultiana has often been called the South Indian form of Rosa moschata ‘Mill’, but we believe it is a perfectly good and distinct species. It is closely related to the South European Rosa sempervirens, thereby referring to its evergreen character. Its leaflets are 5 to 7 together, elliptic and oblong, 1.5 to 2.5 inches across, numerous, in large corymbs, the buds very acute, the fruits globose. It was considered a “geographical form’’ being more robust, with larger flowers and with very glandular leaf petioles, pedicels and calyx. The modern view, however, is different as it is considered to be a part of the musk rose complex (synstylae). It is now called Rosa leschenaultiana, ‘Wight and Arnot'. (Robert Wight also discovered it in 1836 in the same Nilgiri and Palni Mountains). Earlier its nomenclature was either R. sempervirens var ‘Leschenaultiana Thory' (in Redouté, ‘Les Roses’, 1824) or R. moschata var.‘Leschenaultiana Rehder' (in Bailey 1902)....
The distinctive feature of this straggling, climbing rose is its violet and purple stems. It was once very luxuriant and common in the forests, festooning native “shola” trees to a height of 60 to 70 feet with long trails of single pure white flowers, which are faintly fragrant. With the onset of development throughout the area, it is increasingly rare to find. In the Centenary Rose Garden in Ootacamund (now called Uthagamandalam), the capital town of the district of the Nilgiris, the hedges on either side of the wide entrance steps are of this rose species, commonly called the “Ooty Rose”....
In the region where we live, the Palni Hills, a sister mountain to the Nilgiris (both are a part of the Western Ghats) and where the rose grows in the inner vastness of the forests, we have found it in a location by the side of a road leading to an interior hill village, making it easy to take rose enthusiasts to see this special rose species.

[First published in Rose Anciennes en France 2016 and the Rose Letter, February 2017, pp. 2-5]