A NOTE TO OUR READERS:
"Outdoors South: Texas Rose Rustlers" is from the October 2002 issue of Southern Living. Because prices, dates, and other specifics are subject to change, please check all information to make sure it's still current before making your travel plans.

The garden, fragrant with scents of the past, needs a little work. Shannon shrugs. "You can have a perfect flower garden, or you can have dogs. You can't have both," he says.

It's also hard for a traveling man to weed and prune, but the highways actually add to his garden's beauty. As he drives through East Texas as a representative of an environmental testing service, Shannon often brings home vintage roses that he finds beside roads, in rural cemeteries, and in backyards where he asks for cuttings. "I'm in sewer plants a lot," he comments. "It's nice to come home and smell roses."

Shannon is a member of the Texas Rose Rustlers, a group of nearly 250 who actually steal nothing but rescue from oblivion 19th- and early-20th-century varieties of roses and fragrances. As Shannon drives through Chireno, his antique rose of a hometown, we're on our way to go rustling.

Other rustlers prowl elsewhere in Texas. They gather quarterly to share information and research three types of roses: antique (roses predating 1867), old (roses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries), and found roses (Jane Doe floral orphans of forgotten names).

For the roses to survive another generation of gardeners, capitalism is proving to be the best fertilizer. The Antique Rose Emporium in Independence propagates and sells these plants, many of which rustlers gathered as single cuttings (always with permission first).

"It's like taking a sliver of an old armoire and growing a new one," Shannon says of a cutting as we walk through the cemetery at Attoyac Missionary Baptist Church. We pause at the graves of Belton and Gennie Thompson where 'Attoyac Cemetery Gallica' blooms. Shannon found it, named it, and now shares its cuttings with others.

Women and potatoes gave Texas the gift of such roses. As they left homes in the Southeast to bounce west in wagons, they stuck cuttings into spuds to keep them moist during the trip. A hard life awaited those females and flowers. To paraphrase an old saying, Texas was hell on women and roses. "The pioneer women didn't have time to baby the roses," Shannon says. "They usually planted them at the back door and threw the dishwater on them."

We're at Mount Herman Cemetery now, admiring the dark red roses that grow at the grave of Tempie Koonce, Shannon's great-grandmother. "I call it 'Great-Grandma Tempie's' rose," he says. "These flowers are like the Texas women who grew them--they're tough as a boot, but they're all sweet. The only shade this rose gets is when a bird flies over it." Shannon smiles and adds, "The only fertilizer it gets is when a bird flies over it."

These old roses endured potatoes, droughts, and dishwater but faded in the early 20th century when the new hybrid varieties debuted like pretty-in-pink belles and turned gardeners' heads. The old teas, Chinas, Noisettes, and Bourbons shrank into the corners of gardens like wallflowers in the dance of breezes.

The tough old girls survived, however, thanks to partners such as the Texas Rose Rustlers.