Harison’s Yellow Rose

Susan McCullough says:

We have this rose on our Nebraska farm, originally homesteaded by a German family. I found additional info about the plant…looks like the photos didn’t come across’ but you have them on this site.

Yellow Scots Roses

The well-known rose ‘Harison’s Yellow’ has a special significance in the history of Scots Roses in America. It was a home-grown rose, raised in about 1824 by George Folliott Harison (1777-1846), a New York attorney. Harison sold a plant of it to William Robert Prince in about 1830 in exchange for a new Camellia that Prince had imported from Britain. The rose was effectively a double yellow Scots Rose – a hybrid between R. spinosissima and R. foetida, but not recognised as such at the time.

The hybrid between R. spinosissima and R. foetida has been given the name Rosa x harisonii in honour of George Harison and his ‘Harison’s Yellow’ but the hybrid probably arose in Britain before ‘Harison’s Yellow’ because double yellow Scots Roses were in existence from the very early years of the 19th century, having been raised by Robert Brown in Perth and Robert Austin in Glasgow.

I am not certain which of the surviving double yellow Scots Rose cultivars is the true original ‘Harison’s Yellow’. The name ‘Harison’s Yellow’ has been made famous as a rose that was carried across America by pioneer families and it is still found growing by deserted homesteads along the Oregon Trail. However, are all these roses the original ‘Harison’s Yellow’? I have not been able to explore the Pioneer Trail sites in person but photographs that I have seen of so-called ‘Harison’s Yellow’ in America as well as plants sold under the name in Britain and mainland Europe seem to reveal that they are not all the same cultivar. I suspect that other varieties of R. x harisonii or seedlings of ‘Harison’s Yellow’ itself may be involved. In Britain, gardeners and nurserymen have tended to apply one of a small number of names published in the 20th century rose books to any Scots Rose that they come across. Has this happened with ‘Harison’s Yellow’ in North America? Has there been a tendency to name any double yellow Spinosissima within a certain range of parameters as ‘Harison’s Yellow’?

Hybrids similar to ‘Harison’s Yellow’, were raised by Thomas Hogg of New York, Samuel Feast of Baltimore and possibly others. Seedlings were also raised from ‘Harison’s Yellow’. William Prince himself commented in 1846 that “numerous seedlings have been raised from this variety, but all that have come from under my notice have proved very similar, or inferior to it.” It is possible that old plants of so-called ‘Harison’s Yellow’ include seedlings from ‘Harison’s Yellow’ or another variety.

I have not seen a contemporary (1830s) illustration of ‘Harison’s Yellow’ but the variety ‘Hogg’s Double Yellow’ was described by Professor David Don and illustrated in colour in Sweet’s British Flower Garden of 1838. This semi-double variety “was brought from New York by Mr. James McNab, who received it from Mr. Thomas Hogg, Nurseryman in that city, by whom the plant was raised from seeds of the single yellow rose [R. foetida], and it is known in the nurseries by the name of ‘Hogg’s yellow American rose’. It is a pretty variety, but it is surpassed in the fullness of its flowers, and in the richness of colouring by Williams’s double yellow rose.”

‘Hogg’s Double Yellow’ from The British Flower Garden by Robert Sweet Vol. 4 (1838), courtesy the Arnold Arboretum Library

It has been suggested that ‘Hogg’s Double Yellow’ was in fact ‘Harison’s Yellow’ under another name and that James McNab had misunderstood its origin. However, the account seems clear and there is no reason why it should not have been another variety. Thomas Hogg was an expatriate Scot, born in Berwickshire, Scotland in 1778 and he emigrated to New York in 1820. His nursery catalogue of 1834 (the year in which James McNab and Robert Brown visited the nursery) listed five Scotch Roses and “Harrisonia” (Harisonii) but it does not include anything that could be ‘Hogg’s Double Yellow’. Hogg’s seedling may not have been available for sale by that time but by 1843, Hovey and Co of Cambridge, near Boston, Massachusetts were selling “Double yellow Harrison” (fine yellow, double), “Hogg’s Seedling Scotch” (double, pale yellow) and “Williams’ double yellow” (bright yellow). However, the name of Hogg’s plant is not in current use and both Robert Buist in his Rose Manual (1844) and Prince in his catalogue treat it as synonymous with ‘Harison’s Yellow’.

R. x harisonii ‘Williams’s Double Yellow’ (often called ‘Williams Double Yellow’ today) was raised in about 1826, in Pitmaston, Worcestershire, England. I am not convinced that the plant currently sold as ‘Williams Double Yellow’ is the same plant as that originally given the name. A description by Professor David Don and colour illustration published in Sweet’s British Flower Garden of 1836 shows a cultivar that is superior in flower form to the plant currently sold under the name. Although the ‘William’s Double Yellow’ sold today is striking in colour and abundance of bloom, it has rather messy, poorly formed individual flowers with a green bud in the centre.

‘Williams’s Double Yellow’ from The British Flower Garden by Robert Sweet Vol. 4 (1838), courtesy the Arnold Arboretum Library

Many other forms of R. x harisonii or seedlings of it are in cultivation today. Some of them are closer to R. spinosissima and others closer to R. foetida. Double yellow Scots Roses are common in old gardens in parts of Scotland, often forming a hedge in front of old cottages in country villages. Plants with the names ‘Lutea’ and ‘Lutea Maxima’ (both single), ‘Harison’s Yellow’, ‘Williams Double Yellow’ and ‘Old Double Yellow Scotch’ are the most readily available forms from nurseries in Britain, but I have seen other varieties in old gardens in Scotland.

Even more single, semi-double and double yellow cultivars are grown in Scandinavia, Finland and Germany, but some of these appear to be hybrids with ‘Altaica’ or other ‘Grandiflora’ types of R. spinosissima, unlike Scots Roses in habit .

A single form of R. x harisonii

One of many single and double hybrids between R. spinosissima and R. foetida (i.e. a form of Rosa x harisonii)

A double form of R. x harisonii found by the author in Scotland

Some forms of R. x harisonii have a pleasant scent similar to that of R. spinosissima, while others have the less pleasant scent of R. foetida. Some are so close to R. spinosissima in appearance that they are only immediately distinguishable as R. foetida hybrids or seedlings of such hybrids by their scent.

Other yellow hybrids of Rosa spinosissima were raised in the 20th century using rose species newly introduced from Asia. These include ‘Albert Edwards’, which is a hybrid of R. spinosissima ‘Altaica’ with R. hugonis that has single flowers of pale yellow (raised by Hillier Nurseries, Winchester, in 1938), and ‘Helen Knight’, which is a hybrid of ‘Altaica’ with R. ecae, having single, bright yellow flowers (raised by Frank Knight at the RHS Garden Wisley in 1966 and named in 1978). ‘Ormiston Roy’ is a hybrid with R. xanthina ‘Allard’. It has single yellow flowers and unlike the other two, has something of the habit of a Scots Rose. It was raised in the Netherlands by Doorenbos in 1938. There are several other more complex hybrids that contain R. spinosissima, such as ‘Frühlingsgold’ (raised by Kordes in Germany in 1937) and ‘Aïcha’ (raised by Petersen in Denmark in 1966). These beautiful roses have a relatively small percentage of R. spinosissima genes (‘Altaica’ in these cases) compared with other roses that I have mentioned. They are large shrubs with large leaves and flowers. They bear no resemblance to the Scots Roses.