A rose named ‘Just Joey’?
One of the greatest privileges of being a rose breeder must be the ability to name a rose after someone you love. Better still when it is a rose that is cherished around the world. Roger Pawsey got to do that with ‘Just Joey’ over fifty years ago and has had many causes to celebrate since.
Roger is a member of one of the greatest family of rose breeders in British history – the Cant family. The first Cants nursery opened in Colchester in the 1720s and the family began hybridising roses in the 1870s.
During the Second World War rose production ceased in Britain and nurseries like Cants were forced to turn their fields over to food production. It took time for breeding to start again – many years in the case of Cants.
Fresh beginnings
Roger, who had been born during the war in 1941, began working in the family nursery as a teenager. In 1959, aged just 17, his father sent him to Northern Ireland to spend eight months at the famous Dicksons’ nursery.
He says: “My father asked Pat if I could come over there, just to see how other businesses work. That’s where I saw Pat doing the breeding. When I got back, I persuaded my aunt, Miss Cant, who was my late mother’s sister, to let me use some of the old greenhouses to start breeding.”
Roger, it turned out, had a good eye for a rose. And not just a rose! At a club event one night he got talking with a beautiful young woman, the daughter of a retired Army major. By the end of the evening he had invited Joanna Ware – on a date.
“I was 18,” she says. “I told him I’d have to ask my father!”.
“And what did Daddy say?”
“He made a stipulation that I had to be back at a certain time, but he agreed. That’s how it was then! My father would let me go out but would meet me from dances and things. After that we went on more dates and eventually his Lordship asked me to marry him. I agreed!”
‘Just Joey’
Roger and Joanna married in 1965. Or, rather, Roger and Joey married in 1965. “I have always been called Joey, except by my mother,” says the now Mrs Pawsey. “When she called me Joanna I knew I was in for trouble!”
A few years after walking his new wife down the aisle, Roger spotted a stunning Hybrid Tea rose among that season’s seedlings. It was a pale to darker apricot with a strong fragrance.
“He was working in the greenhouse with his father,” says Joey. “He told his Dad he wanted to name a rose for me – for Joey. His father said: ‘What? Just Joey?’ And that was it. The name stuck!” The rose went on to claim awards around the world and is a World Federation of Rose Societies Hall of Fame winner.
“Its colour was unique in its day,” says Roger. “It’s the colour and smell that sells a rose, not how it grows. At the time the plant itself was criticised by the Royal National Rose Society judges for being too untidy.”
“Are you untidy?” I ask Joey. She laughs. “Actually no! If anything, I’m a control freak!”
60th wedding anniversary
This year Roger and Joey will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary with their daughter, son and grandchild. Has it been a happy marriage?
“It’s had its ups and downs, like all marriages,” says Joey. “I don’t believe old people who say they’ve been happily married all this time. Once you get over the initial flush you have to work at it.”
I tell them our chat reminds me of my teenage days, writing stories for the Hartlepool Mail for 4p a line. I used to go out with the photographers when they were taking golden and diamond wedding anniversary photographs. Usually I’d ask couples the secret of a long marriage. Often it would come to three words: “Give and take.”
“Oh, Roger could get it down to two words,” laughs Joey.
“I bet I know what they are,” I reply, remembering some of those old interviews. Are they: ‘Yes, dear?’”
“That’s right,” she says. “Though sometimes it might be ‘Yes, darling!’”
Loved internationally
Roger and Joey have both taken enormous pleasure from the joy their rose has given people. Roger tells the story of going on holiday to New Zealand and sitting in the courtyard of their hotel in Christchurch among a host of potted roses.
“There was a ‘Just Joey’ in full flower. So, I went to see the owner. She didn’t know who I was. She told me she loved her roses and I asked which was her favourite. ‘Just Joey,’ she replied.
“I said: ‘Well would you like to come and meet her?’ She looked at me strangely. Then I told her: ‘I’m the breeder and Joey is outside.’ We didn’t pay for any drinks that night!”
Over the years other triumphs followed for Roger, including ‘Alpine Sunset’ (1974), ‘English Miss’ (1977) and ‘Goldstar’ (1981). But none of his roses has had the same appeal as ‘Just Joey’.
Retirement
As the couple got older and Roger stopped hybridising. Neither their children nor nieces were interested in coming into the business as it stood. Roger and his brother and sister decided to sell the land they had grown roses on to developers. It is a story you hear often – the land is worth far more for housing than growing plants, and if the next generation are not interested the decision to sell is not a difficult one.
Roger says: “It was good for my pension but not for the shop that we had still kept, selling containerised roses when bareroot roses were not available. The houses they built had barely any gardens – all those customers on our doorstep and none with any space to grow roses!”
In 2023 the nursery closed its doors for the final time, bringing an end to around 300 years of horticultural history. But the nursery’s fame lives on… in a romantic rose called ‘Just Joey’.
This is the first in a series of romantic stories associated with roses for February and Valentine’s Day.
Banner image: Roger Pawsey with wife Joanna ‘Joey’, who is the inspiration for the Hall of Fame rose ‘Just Joey’. Image: Pawsey family and Charles Quest-Ritson