My rose prunes gardeners

This oversight is even more strange when you consider that as these visitors stand persuasively on our doorstep, the plant is inches from them. It may even have clawed at them like a cat as they approached the door. It isn't easy to miss. And it really does have to be radically chopped back each year or it will take over the known universe. It has taken over this wall of the house, as it is. It grows with rampant disregard for any form of ordinary decency.

But pruning it is not an easy job. I know no plant with such lethally hooked thorns. It attaches itself to you, your clothing, your ladder, and your clippers. Every thick-wood branch you successfully fell is immediately entangled and refuses to fall to the ground.

My "Illustrated Encyclopedia of Roses" has this to say (among other things) about Rosa filipes 'Kiftsgate': "... not a rose for the faint-hearted.... This rose will reach 35 feet in height. Indulged to its fullest it may equal the original rose growing to around 50 feet."

Oddly, I did not first come across this remarkable creature when, years ago, I visited a garden in Gloucestershire called Kiftsgate Court. I met a lot of other vigorous plants that moist summer afternoon.

To say they were all flourishing is an understatement, and I well remember how this breathtaking jungle of horticulture was dripping with warm wetness. The rose that bears this garden's name (the specific variety of the native Chinese species was first grown here) is well-suited to the scale and fullness of that place.

The encyclopedia again: "This rose ... [at Kiftsgate] is now quite enormous having climbed up through a large copper beech and also worked its way through a large part of the formal rose garden."

Formal, it is not. How could I have missed it? If it had been in flower, I couldn't have. But its flowering season is not very long, and once it is over, before the hips ripen red, it is not an eye-catcher.

The first time I noticed it was in the garden of a friend's parents. It was in amazing contrast to the truly extraordinary tidiness of this garden. But it was given full rein in the woodland on the far side of the billiard-table of a lawn, and climbed like a vertical stampede up into a lofty silver birch. In full flower, it was a sight to see.

The flowers are creamy white with yellow centers. They are individually as small as any rose flowers I've seen. But they are spectacular because, as the encyclopedia puts it, there are so many of them that they look like "a mountain of snow in summer." It goes on: "The individual flowers are borne on very long slender peduncles in huge cascading sprays."

Ah, maybe the peripatetic trimming folk know a thing or two after all. Maybe they do know peduncles when they see them. Maybe they know that where there are peduncles (slender stems for single flowers), there may also be ferocious thorns. Maybe.

All I know is they never offer to trim my Rosa filipes 'Kiftsgate.'

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