Liesbeth Cooper almost missed a letter saying she had won a prestigious international rose award.

The letter from Dr. Tommy Cairns, president of the World Federation of Rose Societies (WFRS) was sent via another member of the Bermuda Rose Society, and then accidentally delivered to that member?s neighbour.

?I just happened to be walking by and the neighbour said they thought they had a letter for me,? said Mrs. Cooper. ?When I opened it I didn?t believe that it could be for me. It came as a huge shock when I found I had won the award.?

The letter informed Mrs. Cooper that she was receiving an award from WFRS for her work preserving old Bermuda roses and tracing their parentage.

Mrs. Cooper has been a member of the Bermuda Rose Society since the late 1960s, has helped to organise a rose convention and also planned out a special garden of old Bermuda roses at Waterville, Bermuda National Trust headquarters.

?The Bermuda Rose Society has been very ahead of its time preserving the old roses that are here and have stood the test of time,? said Mrs. Cooper.

Mrs. Cooper said in more recent times, people have started to appreciate the value of old roses, because they are hardier and tend to be better adjusted to Bermuda?s hot climate.

?If you were in Bermuda a hundred years ago, you probably would have seen much the same roses that you see today,? she said. ?Because Bermuda was on a route between Europe and the United States, there was a great exchange of roses. A lot of Bermudians had connections in South Carolina and Texas and there was this exchange.?

An example of some of these old Bermuda roses brought over would include Champney?s Pink Cluster, a noisette rose that was brought here in the early 1800s.

?So people were always interested in roses,? said Mrs. Cooper. ?I don?t know what it is. Maybe it is that roses represent love and peace. At one time roses would be hung over a table to indicate that the talks were ?sub rosa? or private.?

Mrs. Cooper was born in Holland, but moved to the East Indies with her family at a young age.

?I grew up in Java, an Indonesian Island,? she said. ?My father was a magistrate in Sumatra. He had to go around to the native villages on horseback and meet out discipline and mediate disputes. We spent the war years in a Japanese concentration camp. A lot of people in the camps suffered from malnutrition and were maltreated. We were very lucky. We survived.?

After the war she and her family went back to Holland to finish up her high school education. She won a Fulbright Scholarship which allowed her to study in the United States. Eventually, she went on to study nursing in Montreal, Canada.

?My husband Neil and I met in Montreal, although I had already been to his parents? house while I was visiting my roommate?s home in Bermuda,? she said. ?Neil?s father said: ?Anytime you want to come and stay with us, you just let us know!??

She took him up on his offer and went to stay with the Coopers the following year. She and Neil Cooper were married in 1956.

?I became interested in roses by a fluke,? said Mrs. Cooper. ?My mother-in-law had a couple of roses in her garden and I slipped some of them.?

Rose slipping is growing them through cuttings rather than from seed. Rose slipping is a bit like water divining, some people have the knack, and some don?t.

?For some people it is a breeze to slip roses and for some people it is very difficult,? said Mrs. Cooper. ?I think also it depends on the season. The best time is between in October and January. Sometimes you just have to be daring and just stick them in and say ?if you grow you grow and if you don?t, you don?t?. Don?t fuss over them.

?Doris Smith, who was president of the Bermuda Rose Society at the time, heard that I had successfully slipped roses. She said I to be a member of the Bermuda Rose Society. So I became a member in 1967. Doris Smith was Sally Madden?s mother. Sally Madden is the current president of the Bermuda Rose Society.?

Membership in the society ignited an interest in old Bermuda roses for Mrs. Cooper.

?Roses in Bermuda often have names like Vincent Godsiff or Emmie Gray. These are people who had the roses in their garden. Lots of people took slips from them, and called the rose they got after them or after a place such as Smith?s Parish. The original names, and historical pedigree of the rose has often been lost. We call these mystery roses.?

The ancestry of roses is further confused by nature itself, which sometimes creates something new in the form of rose hybrids.

Mrs. Cooper began to trace the origin of some of Bermuda?s traditional roses by collecting them and sending them abroad to rose DNA experts.

?You send the youngest possible material such as a flower bud or a newly opened leaf,? she said. ?It has to be properly labelled and sent in plain kitchen paper.

?Bermuda Kathleen was first thought to be a hybrid Musk, but that was found to be something completely different,? said Mrs. Cooper.

?We sent the leaves from Mutabilis and Kathleen to a person in France who does DNA analysis to determine that our rose was not a sport but probably a hybrid probably grown new from seed. So for that rose a parent can never really be found.?

Another rose the Bermuda Rose Society sent away for study was called Sunset locally. It was discovered that Sunset was officially E. Veyrat Hermanos and was bred in France in 1895.

Since joining the Bermuda Rose Society all those years ago, Mrs. Cooper has held down many hats in the organisation including president and photographic editor of the society?s book ?Roses in Bermuda?.

?It is good to have some older members in the group,? she said. ?So often when you have people who are brand new at something they try to reinvent the wheel.

?In the early days we were meeting in people?s homes so the meetings were much smaller and less structured. Someone might exchange slips. Someone would talk read an essay about a particular rose or give tips to new members.?

Later the Bermuda Rose Society was offered their own space in the Arrowroot Factory in the Botanical Gardens. More recently they have moved to Montrose Mews, also at the Botanical Gardens.

?I live in a condo now so I can?t grow much anymore,? said Mrs. Cooper. ?But we still have a family home in Bailey?s Bay and I have a rose garden there. I can garden some, but not as much as I would like. My favourite rose has to be the Duchesse de Brabant or shell rose.?

The award from the WFRS was handed out at a special convention in Japan. Unfortunately, Mrs. Cooper could not attend, but another Bermuda Rose Society member, Marijke Peterich accepted the award on her behalf.

?She went for two reasons,? said Mrs. Cooper. ?She was vice president of the North American Region of the World Federation of Rose Societies (NAWFRS) and she is also Dutch like myself.?

Mrs. Cooper said she didn?t want to accept the award without giving credit to her fellow Bermuda Rose Society members.

?I would very much like you to emphasise that I really did not do anything without other people,? she said.

?I would like to give credit to others in the Bermuda Rose Society who worked hard to make the society what it is today. First of all we should recognise the ?pioneers? who had the foresight to form a society for the preservation and propagation of the old roses which were growing in these islands and had stood the test of time.

?These early members were among the first, if not the very first, in the world to realise the importance of preserving the old treasures.

?The Bermuda Rose Society should share the recognition I received in the form of the World Rose Award.?