A man of roses

This is a Soviet-era story of one man’s passion for inventing rose varieties in a country of short summers, and heavy winter snowfalls. Vello Veski wrote the definitive monograph on Estonian Roses in 1972, and his legacy runs to several recognised cultivars.

Roses hold a fascination in popular culture, and among devotees the world over. Love is a red, red rose, we are told, and The Name of the Rose, a best-selling novel by Umberto Eco. In Sufi lore, love between the nightingale and the rose symbolises the mystical union between the adept and God. The rose symbolises Mary Mother of God, and in an earlier era, the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis.  

A search of the botanical gardens in Tallinn reveals only one rose variety by the man who was hired to establish the gardens in 1957, and among pioneers of rose-breeding in Estonia. This is Koit or Dawn, an attractive, tightly wound pink bloom with a delicate fragrance.

I visit with Vello’s daughter, Tiiu Kull, a professor of botany at the University of Life Sciences in Tartu. Her name is given to one of Vello’s best-known cultivars; another is Tibiroos, the name of Tiiu’s childhood doll. Together with Kati, these varieties are still popular with the gardening public.

Tiiu grew up in a household of botanists. Her mother Esta gained the highest degree in horticultural science in 1967, against the day she would become the family breadwinner. She had a university research and teaching career in her own right; her thesis was in hydroponics, in the early days of this field.

Vello’s health was never good, and the achievements he made in his career were to an extent a race against time. In 1955 he completed the equivalent of a doctorate with a thesis titled, “Effective cultivation of roses, and in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic of optimal growing conditions for rosehip species”.

This work reflected in Soviet times a huge interest among botanists in developing rose varieties for Estonian conditions. There are wild exotic species that flower by the sea in pine forests, and, as elsewhere in the world, a keen interest in roses in private gardens.

I photograph a newly opened pink bud in Tiiu’s garden, and catch the fragrance of Tibiroos. This is the house among pine trees where she grew up, and as a child could not but help take an interest in botany.

In the 1970s the family travelled to Latvia to apply for recognition from a Soviet governing body for verifying and registering new rose varieties. Given tens of thousands of rose varieties worldwide, this was and still is a serious undertaking with a fair degree of bureaucracy attached. Koit received its recognition by the Soviet Union in 1978, in the year after Vello’s death. Throughout the following decades it has been a favourite of many Estonian rose lovers.

To keep Vello’s rose varieties alive, Tiiu’s eldest daughter, Tiia, has planted all at their summer house in Noarootsi, at a location coincidentally called Rooslepa. (The name here has a different origin, related to Rootslased, the Estonian word for the Swedes who once settled there.)

The book on the botanical gardens also has several pages devoted to the history of the rosarium, and Vello gets a mention along with several other pioneers of rose breeding and cultivation at the gardens.

In search of passages of interest, I note repeated mention of the weather, instances in certain years of especially heavy snowfalls, and of the gardeners toiling away the daylight hours pruning, keeping the plants alive and thriving, and keenly awaiting the appearance of flowers, to see whether they had discovered the next new rose variety.