When Victory in Europe was announced on 8 May, 1945 the British nation was ecstatic, celebratory – and exhausted. The country had fought with every sinew, and that battle – as with our current crisis – depended not just on those on the front line but in every household and every job.
We are all familiar with the Dig For Victory campaign, which was promoted to counter the blockade by German U-boats of food imports, although I suspect few of us realise the extent to which not just gardens but public spaces were dug up and cultivated.
This was not just an enthusiasm for home-grown veg – there was an edge of desperate need. Britain’s agricultural output rose by a huge 66 per cent, but the effort to do this had been all-consuming.
In 1939 pleasure gardening had more or less been put on hold.
Monty Don explored how gardens across Britain changed after the Second World War ended. Pictured: The Peace rose is as resilient as it is beautiful
But when the soldiers came home in 1945 and women who had spent the war working in factories or other essential war work returned to their conventional role as housewife and mother – exactly as my own mother did – they wanted a home they could enjoy rather than one that was an extension of their effort to win the war.
People wanted peace, colour, ease, and above all normality.
One of the direct results of the Blitz, which destroyed so many homes, was the urgent building of new dwellings – many in new towns – which had gardens attached. This was a transformative experience for many people.
In the early 20th century – when most of the 1945 generation of adults who lived through the Second World War were growing up – only 30 per cent of British homes had gardens.
Today that figure is around 90 per cent. Much of that increase was thanks to new properties built immediately after the war.
However, new towns deliberately reduced the number of allotments they contained. Instead of learning the lessons of the war and creating more spaces for people to grow food, planners deliberately turned their backs on this policy.
Rose breeder Francis Meilland, developed the peace rose in France, in 1935. Pictured: Francis with the symbolic flower
The war was behind them and, rightly or wrongly, everyone wanted to move on into a brave new world of peace and domesticity.
The new homes had the hitherto unknown luxuries of bathrooms, indoor lavatories, fitted kitchens… and gardens. What people wanted from these outdoor spaces were lawns, flowers and somewhere to hang the washing – not the wartime labour of digging for victory.
This is the backdrop to perhaps the best-known and one of the best-loved roses of all time.
It is a hybrid tea rose developed in France by rose breeder Francis Meilland in 1935 and given the decidedly unromantic name 3-35-40.
Vive la France, the tea from china
Hybrid tea roses, which dominated rose gardens for much of the 20th century, are a man-made hybrid. The first was named ‘La France’, available in 1867.
One of their parents is from the China tea roses, notable for their repeat flowering – unlike more common shrub roses, which tended to flower only once a year.
The first of these tea roses were imported from China by the East India Company, whose main trade was tea, hence the name.
The first hybrid tea was named ‘La France’. Pictured: A rose show in London in 1873
These roses were often not hardy and, in many cases, weak-growing, but Victorians loved them, especially for wearing in a buttonhole because the buds, unusually, had a high, pointed centre.
The other parent of the first hybrid tea, raised in a nursery in Lyon, France, is unknown, although it is thought to be a hybrid perpetual – a vigorous, repeat-flowering rose that was very popular in the Victorian era.
But by the 1890s hybrid teas were replacing them in gardens, and British breeders soon developed roses that were hardy, flowered continually throughout summer and, as they produced their flowers on new growth, could be pruned right back each winter and underplanted with annuals.
Thousands of hybrid teas have been bred and millions sold, but none has been remotely as popular as the world’s most famous rose – Peace.
Four years later this new hybrid was proving successful and reliable so, with war looming, he sent cuttings to fellow growers in the US, Italy, Turkey and Germany – in fact, it was sent to America on the very last flight out of France before the German occupation to ensure its survival.
Although Francis Meilland named the new rose ‘Madame A. Meilland’, after his late mother, in the chaos of the wartime years each of the growers around the world gave it different names.
After VE Day Meilland realised all these different names had to be coalesced into one, so he wrote to Field Marshal Alan Brooke and asked if he would consent to his name being given to the rose in recognition of his role in liberating France.
Brooke modestly declined, saying he had merely been a cog in the war machine, and in his opinion a more appropriate name would be ‘Peace’.
And so this large rose, varying from pale yellow flushed with pink to pink flushed with yellow depending on where and how it is grown, was formally registered as ‘Peace’. In subsequent years millions and millions were sold and planted in gardens old and new around the world.
Its popularity had something to do with the name and the timing – what could be a better symbol of the new desire for beauty, ease and enjoyment than a rose? – but also with the fact that it is an extraordinarily strong, healthy rose that performs beautifully every time in every garden.
I remember renting a house about 30 years ago with a Peace rose growing in the garden and the blooms stood at least 2 metres tall, on straight and strong stems, yet I know that it had been shamefully neglected for years.
Hybrid teas were the dominant type of rose in the 1950s and 60s, and this is the most celebrated example. However, from the 1980s they have become far less popular, with shrub roses having taken their place in many gardeners’ affections.
But they are a true taste of the national spirit in the years following VE Day, and of the hopes of all those who’d been through six years of hard slog and deprivation, as well as some heroism and some hell.
A rose that grew well and was trouble free, reliably producing gorgeous blooms on strong, straight stems, was the perfect symbol not of war but of the future and, above all, of a longed-for peace.
These days, our blooms are in a spot of bother
Black spot was a lot less common in Britain back in 1945 than it is today, especially in towns and cities. There were two reasons for this.
The first was that it was a drier-than-normal summer, and the fungus thrives in warm, wet conditions. But more significantly, the air quality then was less conducive to fungi such as black spot.
Monty revealed black spot was less common in Britain back in 1945, because it was a drier-than-normal summer and the air quality was less conducive to fungi. Pictured: A rose with its leaves blighted by black spot
This is because most homes were heated by coal fires. Every household in London and in cities across the country belched smoke, as did factories and power stations all over the land.
For humans this was appalling and the air quality was horrific. But the sulphur dioxide pollution was an effective constraint on the fungus.
Ironically, the cleaner the air and the further you lived from the big industrial conurbations, the greater the chance your roses would be afflicted by black spot.
It is a disease caused by a fungus, Diplocarpon rosae, that causes unsightly, dark-brown blotches on the leaves of roses and can lead to total defoliation.
Although it never kills the plant, it can seriously weaken it and therefore affect its ability to produce good blooms.
Hybrid tea roses are prone to black spot and gardeners used to habitually spray them with sulphur compounds as a fungicide, or dust the soil with soot, which helped kill the fungal spores – but also almost every other living thing too!
Monty recalled that every household in London belched smoke (pictured), making the air quality horrific for humans
In fact, the health problems of hybrid teas compared to the older, more robust shrub roses built up the myth that roses were tricky to grow and needed special skills to make them bloom well, whereas the reality is that they are, for the most part, able to withstand almost total neglect.
The obsession with the pruning of hybrid teas, with so much importance placed on the position and angle of each cut, has persisted to this day, even though all research has shown that shears do the job equally well and that cropping with a hedgecutter or even a chain saw will scarcely have any ill effect at all.
Since the use of coal has almost entirely ceased in cities and sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere has dramatically reduced, black spot has become more prevalent.
It particularly affects yellow roses and Peace is very susceptible to it. But it has never affected this variety’s ability to produce stems topped by healthy blooms – despite the leaves looking blighted.
One of the best solutions is to prune the bushes so they grow as an open goblet with as much ventilation able to pass through and around each stem as possible.
All the affected leaves should be gathered and burnt. Then cross your fingers for a dry summer.