The Caledonia Rose

This rose has a story. I call it the Caledonia Rose.

Seldom did I get to spend “alone” time with my Grandaddy, Dixon Risinger, but one day we got to take a road trip to El Dorado together. He loved driving backroads and looking at old timber and structures covered in vines and overgrowth so he could tell his grandchildren about what these places looked like when he was a boy and the work that occurred there during his childhood.

This particular day he was reliving the “cotton” years and where gins were located in wagon distance from his home place. Caledonia was one of them.

His route included the “Boy Scout” road where DeSoto Boy Scout Camp is located and on the Caledonia side of the entrance is a hill covered in old growth timber as if something important used to be there. And it was.

He stopped the truck and we walked out under the old, old oak trees and looked around. I didn’t know what we were looking for but he did.

Then, being the flower person I am, my eyes landed on something white in the viney overgrowth. It was this running rose growing unattended with the oaks, fierce with thorns and having pure white single petals and camellia-like golden centers.

“Granddaddy!! Why would this be here all by itself with no one taking care of it?” His face lit up with a smile.

“That’s what I was looking for… some evidence of what stood here. It probably covered an arbor or building.”

“What was it Granddaddy?”

“Rhonda, a woman’s college was on this hill years ago. There were several structures in this place, but nothing remains now except a white rose.”

“Do you think we can take some?”

“I don’t see why not!”

I carried a piece home and propagated as many divisions as I could, and gave all the rooted plants to my mother, Karen Trull.

A year ago she asked me if I’d like a start of ”the white rose” for my farm. I felt like history had come full circle and I dug up three divisions to carry with me.

This year it’s blooming for the first time at Richland Creek. Isn’t she beautiful? She’s a hidden piece of history, probably late 1800’s, with buried treasure – the stories of young ladies trying to make a way in a world before their time. I wish she could talk.

I should tell the rest of this rose’s story… 

She is the Cherokee Rose. She is the state flower of Georgia and is found all along the Trail of Tears from Georgia to Oklahoma. The Cherokee nation wept as they traveled the route and legend says every where they cried this white rose sprang up. The flower’s golden center is symbolic of the gold for which our government removed this indigenous tribe from their homeland. 

In actuality, the Cherokee rose was cultivated by the Cherokee people before their removal from Georgia and they carried it with them along the trail. But the Cherokee were not the original ones to bring it into the horticultural trade. It was imported into the United States from Asia in the 1700’s and nurseryman and writer Thomas Affleck sold the Cherokee Rose all over the south to plant as hedges in the mid-1800s.