Take a walk in the woods of Berrien County in April, or drive down Park Street in Ray City and you may see long garlands of simple white roses climbing to heights of up to 20 or 30 feet, rambling over other shrubs and small trees. The three inch diameter flowers are fragrant, with pure white petals and yellow stamens.
Adopted by the Georgia legislature as the state flower in 1916, Georgia’s beloved Cherokee Rose is now known to have originated in China. It was probably brought by sailing ship into the port of Savannah by the mid 1700s, and by 1775 it was being cultivated in the gardens of Georgia. Other horticultural specimens are recorded as having been shipped to American ports from Hong Kong prior to the Revolutionary War. Apparently, this Chinese import naturalized so well, it soon came to be regarded as a native species of Georgia.
The botanist Stephen Elliot noted in 1814 that the Cherokee Rose was cultivated prior to the Revolutionary War by Nathaniel Hall, Esq. at his Morton Hall plantation on the Savannah River. A prominent man in business and political affairs, Nathaniel Hall was nevertheless a gardener who sought the best plantings for his Morton Hall Plantation.
Nathaniel Hall and his family were wealthy slave owners. Hall and his partner, John Inglis, were among the most active slave merchants in Savannah, GA, handling the auction of numerous cargoes of enslaved people brought into the port of Savannah and even financing the purchases of enslaved people by other Georgia plantation owners. Most new arrivals of enslaved people were sold at “slave yards” at public sites along the Savannah River (GHQ, vol, 68, no.2, p. 206). During the American Revolution, Nathaniel Hall was a Royalist, “who had the honor of being a member of His Majesty’s Georgia House of Assembly.” ( GHQ, vol. 26, no.1, p. 52) After hostilities ceased in the Revolutionary War, Nathaniel Hall was declared “Guilty of Treason Against this State…by traiterously Adhering to the King of Great Britain.” His Morton Hall plantation and other properties were confiscated by the State of Georgia and he was “banished from this state forever.” (Revolutionary Records of GA, 376). Morton Hall Plantation later became the property of John McPherson Berrien, for whom Berrien County was named, which he maintained with the labor of 50 enslaved people.
Georgia Gazette, May 23, 1770
TO BE SOLD IN SAVANNAH, On Thursday the 31st Instant, A CARGO consisting of Three Hundred and Forty Healthy NEW NEGROES, CHIEFLY MEN, Just arrived in the Ship Sally, Capt. George Evans, after a short Passage from the Rice Coast of Africa. N.B. The Sale will begin at 11 0’Clock in the Forenoon, and no slaves sold or bargained for till the Gun is fired.
The Cherokee Rose was first described in scientific literature by Andre Michaux, a French botanist who studied and collected specimens of the flora in America from 1785 to 1796. Michaux was once recruited by Thomas Jefferson for a western exploration proposed prior to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Between 1787 and 1791 Michaux made three excursions through coastal Georgia. During these travels, he secured specimens of rose plants from the vicinity of Savannah and established them in his nursery near Charleston, SC. At the time he introduced it the the gardeners of Charleston, he simply referred to it as a Nondescript Rose, and it was cultivated under that name for many years. In 1803 Micheaux published Flora Boreali-Americana and formally described the new species with the Latin name Rosa laevigata Michaux, possibly referencing the smooth canes of this climbing rose.
But in Georgia this Chinese rose import had always been known as the Cherokee Rose, according to Stephen Elliott, a prominent politician and banker who is best known for his work as a botanist. Elliott was a planter and slave owner as well. His sizable plantation interests included Silk Hope plantation on the Ogeechee River in South Carolina, and directly across the river in Georgia, the 1,100 acre Vallambrosa rice plantation.
Stephen Elliott obtained specimens of Cherokee Rose in 1796. He reported planting the roses in a border, which were subsequently left abandoned and yet grew into a substantial hedge. An enslaved man on Elliott’s plantation utilized this Cherokee Rose hedge as a fence to keep livestock out of the garden, the hedge being so dense and impenetrable that “their thorny limbs formed a barrier which no quadruped could break.” Elliott noted several advantages of fencing with hedge rows over the split rail, worm fences common to that time, not the least of which was the shortage of fence timber brought on by the log-rolling, deforestation practices of clearing plantation woodlands for ever more acreage of cotton and rice. He suggested that although the Cherokee Rose had by this time “been introduced into all gardens as an ornamental shrub,” its real utility as a living fence justified changing the name to the Hedge Rose. “In our rural economy this plant will one day become very important. For the purpose of forming hedges, there is perhaps no plant which unites so many advantages; and in quickness of growth, facility of culture, strength, durability, and beauty, it has perhaps no rival.’ [Elliot, Flora of South Carolina and Georgia, quoted in BM t.2847/1828].
By the 1830s the Cherokee Rose was widely recognized as both a superior living fence for agricultural purposes and an essential ornamental in Georgia gardens. Dr. Thomas Fuller Hazzard, of West Point Plantation, St. Simons Island, GA in writing for the Georgia Constitutionalists, reckoned the Cherokee Rose worthy of planting in a conspicuous part of the garden, or in sight of the dwelling house. The doctor published articles on agriculture, on the treatment of influenza, treatments for venomous reptile bites, and on the culture of flowers “as conducive to health, pleasure and rational amusement.” (Jim Bruce)
A one mile long hedge of Cherokee Rose on the plantation of (1766-1853) near Augusta, GA, was said in 1848 to be the best hedge in all the United States. The Delaigle plantation of 14,000 acres was maintained by the labor of over 100 enslaved people. Delaigle (or de L’Aigle) was born in France, his father being Lord of Champ Gerbeau. A son of French aristocracy, he escaped the guillotine during the French Revolution by fleeing in1792 to Saint Domingue (now Haiti). Saint-Domingue was the richest and most prosperous French colony in the West Indies, and its slave-based economy was a major source of tax revenue for France. Enslaved Africans and people of color outnumbered the San Dominican whites by 10-1. By the time of Delaigle’s arrival a “slave revolt” had already ignited and quickly escalated into a race war which culminated in the genocide of all remaining whites in San Domingue in 1804. Delaigle escaped the growing massacre in 1794, being smuggled aboard a ship bound for Charleston, SC from whence he came to Georgia.
In some areas of the south, Elliott’s vision of the “hedge rose” was fulfilled with plantation fields divided by hundreds of miles of living fences of Cherokee Rose. But after the abolition of slavery in the United States and the advent of barbed wire, the Georgia newspapers and agricultural journals mention Cherokee Rose hedges less and less and hybrid roses have largely displaced it in cultivated gardens.
Still, Cherokee Roses ramble through the Georgia woods, antebellum remnants so naturalized as to be thought a native flower of the state.
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