Spend more time smelling antique roses and a little less time fussing with them, was Mr. Lowery's advice to Bermuda rose growers.

"Interference is probably responsible for more roses not thriving rather than non-interference," he told a small group of rose enthusiasts.

He said that gardeners sometimes rip out antique rose varieties and replace them with flashy modern things, because they are under the mistaken impression that vintage roses are delicate and harder to take care of. In fact, the opposite is most often the case. Vintage roses are still in existence after hundreds of years, having withstood the ravages of time and neglect.

Mr. Lowery has one of the largest collection of vintage roses in private hands in North America. His collection formed the basis of Vintage Gardens, a retail and mail order rose nursery in Sebastopol, California.

Vintage Gardens began selling on a small scale in 1984, and in 1991 the first mail order crop was planted. Vintage Gardens continues to ship roses around the United States and abroad, supplying rare roses to garden restorations both public and private. Mr. Lowery is a founding member of the Heritage Rose Foundation, a charity that promotes education about old roses and their preservation.

"The Heritage Rose Society did a study of tea and china roses," said Mr. Lowery. "They did no pruning, no spraying and no interference to see what the roses were capable of when left alone.

"They planted them on 12-foot centres. We are now in the third year and the teas are reaching six feet tall and they are magnificent."

Mr. Lowery said even fertilisers are unnecessary with vintage roses.

"With fertilisers the nitrates are not available for the roses to absorb," he said. "It needs to be broken down by the soil first. I use organic matter in my garden."

Organic matter is produced when things like dry leaves, leaf clippings, and certain bits of household garbage are left for about a year to compost or ferment. "It acts as a covering for the soil, and it also provides a richer environment for companion plants," said Mr. Lowery.

Companion plants are other non-rose plants you might put in with your roses.

"Bermuda has an alkaline soil," he said. "Organic matter is one of the best things you can add."

But he admitted that a little interference is necessary to achieve balance in the garden. Mr. Lowery has three acres of garden at his home in California.

"I have about 20 tea roses in my own garden that I leave alone and they are massive," he said. "But in general, if I allow the teas and Chinas (types of roses) to grow some will get bigger than others and will shade out and endanger some cultivated roses I don't want to lose.

"So I do pruning for the aesthetic nature of the garden. I want to achieve balance in the garden and I don't want certain things crowded out.

"But I try to allow the roses to achieve some of their natural dimensions. The larger I allow them to grow the deeper their roots get. This protects them against rodents that like fine white roots. I have the greatest fatality amongst hybrid teas. I almost never lose the old roses."

He said that although the canes (stems) of a rose bush may get less attractive as they age, becoming gnarled and woody, they also become more resistant to insects, and also more tolerant of drought.

"It is a natural protective device," he said. "When you see old canes on plants, how gnarled and gray they are at the bottom, and they have tons of flowers on top, that is because the new growth is reaching for the sun and shading the old growth. The plant is reutilising energy in the old branches. Nothing is wasted in a plant."

He said he will remove dead wood only if there is no green tissue left within it. "If there is some green tissue then it is providing nutrients to the plants," said Mr. Lowery. "The process of a gardener thinning out a rose bush, I don't think has a positive benefit. The more biomass the plant has the better."

Mr. Lowery said he first became interested in roses when his family moved to California and there was a bush in the backyard.

"There was a hybrid tea rose in the yard that blossomed with different colours all the time," he said. "I later learned it was a talisman hybrid tea."

He went on to do social work in London, and then became a high school teacher. But he always had a passion for roses.

"I lived in Paris for a little while," he said. "I learned French and that helped me with the roses quite a bit later on, because many of them have French names."

Since 1984, in addition to running his nursery, he has also designed and developed gardens and landscapes in Northern California that have covered a spectrum – from old fashioned and historical plantings to Native Western gardens.

Mr. Lowery has also contributed to a number of historic gardens in other parts of the United States including Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina and Hearst Castle at San Simeon in California.

He is currently supervising a three-year project to create a period garden around an 1870 mansion in Santa Rosa California known as Mableton.

He said some modern ideas about rose gardens are based on a European concept 120 years old. "This ideal is about using roses as bedding colour, spacing them very closely and never using companion plants," he said.

But Mr. Lowery is more a fan of the old English cottage garden style, where roses were just one plant in the garden along with many others.

"It was more a concept of laissez-faire with the roses," he said. "There was less interference from gardeners."

Mr. Lowery said he is a big fan of Bermuda mystery roses. These are roses where the rose's original name is unknown. Bermuda mystery roses are quite popular with vintage rose collectors.

"It would be impossible for me to say which Bermuda mystery rose I like the best," he said. "I like them all. But Bermuda Kathleen is stunning in my garden.

"It is constantly growing into a bigger mass. I love the colour of the flowers. There is nothing like it. All Bermuda mystery roses are dear to my heart. We encourage our customers to grow the Bermuda mystery roses."

For more information about Bermuda mystery roses and antique rose varieties, contact Sally Madden at the Bermuda Rose Society.