As a title, Chasing the Rose packs a double punch. At one level it refers to Andrea di Robilant's search for the identity of a rose that grows wild on his family's former country estate near Venice. It also describes the mindset of rose-fanciers, embodied here by old-rose collector Eleonora Garlant.
The search began when Di Robilant described a pink rose with a distinctive peach-raspberry scent in A Venetian Affair, his biography of an 18th-century ancestor. That casual aside caught the interest of Garlant, who thought the rose might be one of the long-lost China roses that fueled a rose-breeding frenzy in late 18th-century Europe. Spurred on by Garlant's enthusiasm, Di Robilant soon found himself on the hunt for the name and history of his rose.
Di Robilant's quest leads him to Josephine Bonaparte's rose gardens, the China trade, rose smuggling during the Napoleonic wars, the disappearance of "old roses" in the 19th century and their rediscovery in the 20th. He considers orphan roses, natural hybrids and the politics of registering and naming roses today. At each step of his quest he returns to the gardens of Eleonora Garlant, whose own chase of the rose led her to acquire more than 1,000 varieties of old roses--with names and without.
Written and illustrated in a style reminiscent of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, Chasing the Rose is a charming account of a modern obsession and its historical roots. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins