The rose agent

During WW2 rose nurseries across Europe were uprooted to make way for vegetables and other crops. In the painful aftermath of the war, several of Europe’s most successful rose breeding families owed their survival and recovery to their relationship with America’s two biggest rose nurseries and, perhaps, the work of one remarkable man – rose agent Jean Henri Nicolas.

Nicolas was a Frenchman who became well-known as a breeder in his own right. He is credited with introducing the term ‘Floribunda’. But his greatest influence was arguably as an international agent. Through the 1920s and 1930s he regularly travelled to Europe, identifying talented hybridisers whose roses his employers could market in the US.

Born in 1875 in Roubaix near Lille, the textile centre of northern France, Nicolas was the son of a rose-loving cotton manufacturer. (His sprightly 92-year-old great niece insists to her fellow Americans that his name should be pronounced ‘Nee-co-lah’). His father’s rose garden alone covered one and a half acres. Nicolas completed arts and science degrees in Roubaix and at the famous Parisian university, the Sorbonne. (He was later awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Natural Sciences.)

Love and roses

His first encounter with the US was as an agent buying raw cotton for his father’s mills, but while there he fell in love and married. He won his father-in-law’s blessing with a promise to become an American citizen and to move to the US.

Gradually his fascination for growing roses and experimenting with those he imported from France became too strong. After the First World War and his father’s death he decided to quit the textile industry and become a professional rosarian.

He retained his French accent throughout his life but joked: “I do not need my hands to talk!”

His daughter, Lucy Tappan Nicolas, said her father’s career took off in 1924 when Robert Pyle, head of the Conard Pyle nursery in West Grove, Pennsylvania – and President of the American Rose Society at the time – came to Indianapolis to meet him.

Rose agent

Maybe he knew of Nicolas through the Frenchman’s contribution to the 1923 ARS annual – an article on rose hardiness that starts with characteristic humour. “In my missionary work to make rose-lovers out of golf players and other wasters of time…”

Pyle was not disappointed by his visit. Lucy (after whom Nicolas had named one of his Hybrid Bourbon creations) later wrote: “To his amazement [Pyle] found Dr. Nicolas’ basement divided into four corners. In one corner he made wine from grapes he grew; in a second corner, he grew mushrooms; in the third he made beer; and in the fourth corner were the roses. Mr. Pyle was intrigued and offered him a position with his company.”

For the next six years Nicolas worked for the Conard Pyle company, criss-crossing Europe to find great roses.

Plant patenting

He was the right man at the right time. In May 1930 Herbert Hoover signed the US Plant Patent Act, giving the holder of the patent exclusive rights for 17 years.

Though it was around 30 years before similar legislation would be crafted in Europe, it meant that breeders selling their roses into the US could expect a commission. And rose agent Nicolas was the man to help them make the most of that.

In 1930 he joined the rival Jackson & Perkins Nursery in Newark, New York, where he headed the Research Department. There he originated many roses, including the award-winning ‘Eclipse’ rose and ‘Dr. J. H. Nicolas’ – a climber found occasionally in gardens today. But he still continued his travels to Europe.

Nicolas wrote many articles and guides to rose growing, but arguably his best work was the travelogue, A Rose Odyssey, published in 1937. (My copy is signed by Nicolas – a gift to the Secretary of the UK’s National Rose Society, Courtney Page.) It is full of wonderful anecdotes.

Rose agent travels

In one story he tells how he came to meet the great Spanish breeder, Pedro Dot. It was 1925. Nicolas was still working for Conard Pyle and one day visited J. C. N. Forestier, the man who had launched the world’s first rose trials at Bagatelle. Forestier told him about his youngprotégé, Pedro Dot, who had served an apprenticeship at Bagatelle and was now hybridising near Barcelona.

One of his seedlings had won a certificate of merit in the recent trials (probably the pink Hybrid Tea, ‘Margarita Riera’) and Forestierstrongly advised Nicolas to meet Dot. He wasted no time setting off. “That same evening I was on the train for Barcelona,” writes Nicolas.

He arrived at the Spanish frontier station of Port Boue at four in the morning to discover that, contrary to the advice received on departure,he needed a visa in his passport. The nearest Spanish consul was at Perpignan 50 miles behind him. Having missed the last train back, hewas advised his best bet for reaching Perpignan in good time the next day was to walk through a three-mile rail tunnel in the dark to make a connection on the other side.

Dangerous mission?

He enlisted the help of a local “station idler, a perfect impersonation of the bandits of dime novels, who volunteered to guide me through the tunnel. He held a candle lantern in one hand and a big club in the other, ‘to hit the rail,’ he said ‘so wewill not smash ourselves against the wall’… A blacker hole I have never seen… I had two pockets full of coins jingling at each step and re-echoing in that tunnel. I began to realise what a temptation I was, and every time the guide’s club was slow to hit the rail, I was sure it was coming on my head.”

At one point a smoky freight train comes through as they press themselves against the wall, anxiously. “When we came out the sunlight never appeared more beautiful,” he wrote. Visa secured, he resumed his journey, with Dot meeting him at the station. The Conard Pyle company quickly became the Spaniard’s agent, paying a commission for every Dot rose sold in the US – an arrangement that presaged what was to come once patenting legislation was introduced.

Kordes connection

Nicolas also signed up the Kordes family in Germany – this time for his later American employer, Jackson & Perkins. Nicolas would visit the Kordes nursery in Sparrieshoop every year looking for roses that would thrive in the US.

In A Rose Odyssey he shows the strength of his connections and his knowledge in a prescient passage about Francis Meilland. He writes first about Antoine Meilland, praising his rose fields. Then adds: “Meilland’s son, Francis, is rapidly coming to the front. He is an energetic and strictly modern youth of about 25, has travelled much, and made a tour of America in the spring 1935, which was a marvel of nerve. Knowing but little English, he bought a car in New York and started on the road, going alone from coast to coast, from Canada to Mexico!

“A young man with such undaunted spirit is bound to succeed! Francis has taken up hybridizing, which his father never had the time to do. A student of recent developments in genetics and under the guidance of Mallerin, today the most scientific hybridizer in France, Francis follows modern methods. First, he visualizes what is desired; second, selects parents likely to produce that idea; third, makes his crosses in large series (‘a la Ford’). With that system, which is now followed by most successful hybridizers, the goal is more likely and more quickly reached than by fiddling along with small doses each year. We will hear from Francis, and I predict for him a great future.”

Missing out on ‘Peace’

The respect was mutual. Francis Meilland wrote of Nicolas: “Each of us tries to imitate, consciously or not, the men we most admire. In mycase, the ‘ideal’ was Doctor Nicolas.”

Despite this it was Nicolas’ former employer, Robert Pyle, who won the rights to market Meilland’s roses in the US. Pyle had visited Mallerin in France in 1932 and been introduced to the enthusiastic, if then still unproven, Meilland. At the end of the meeting he offered the Frenchman a contract as his distributor in the US. Hot on the heels of this offer came another from Nicolas at Jackson & Perkins, but too late.

Consequently, it was Pyle who got to name and sell Meilland’s famous ‘Peace’ rose. Had Nicolas signed up Meilland first, might Jackson & Perkins have marketed ‘Peace’ – and would they have had the foresight to name it so astutely? We will never know.

Successes

What we do know is that Pyle quickly patented it and after the war the US royalties from ‘Peace’ poured into the Meilland family coffers, giving them the resources they needed to flourish.

It was a similar story in Germany. When many other Germans had resorted to the horse and cart, the Kordes brothers, Wilhelm II and Hermann, were both able to buy Volkswagen Beetles with the post-war cheques they received from Jackson & Perkins. The Americanshad honoured the agreement with their German friends and resumed the partnership when hostilities ended.