Picture these excellent roses (and smell them too - for they are all highly fragrant). The Aquatic Rose: growing happily in ponds, leaves water-lilies sulking in the ha'penny place; the Whole-food Rose: it provides a well-balanced, complete diet for busy human beings; the Tree Rose: big as a noble oak, it is decked with blooms all summer long - causing, admittedly, a bit of a fallen-petal problem on some lawns.
Well, okay, these roses don't actually exist, but they are very much alive in the imagination of Sean McCann. "Roses rule my life," says the 68-year-old rosebreeder, writer and lecturer. They rule his roost too, with every part of house and garden devoted to this romantic, historic, enthralling family. In the narrow Blackrock back garden more than 1,000 rose bushes crowd in towards the green, snaking river of a lawn. Many of the colourful throng are McCann's own spawn: the lucky ones have been named - like the blowsy vermilion `Bloomsday' and the yellow-tinged and red `Swalk', a miniature climber - while others remain unnamed because they're waiting for a patron, or because they're cultivated mainly for their breeding capabilities, or just because a man can't be expected to think up a name for each and every one of his seedlings. Among the diverse gathering there are showy, long-stemmed hybrid teas, dainty miniature and patio roses, rowdy floribundas, questing climbers, cherished old garden roses and modern English varieties.
Inside the house, more roses - real, painted and photographed - adorn walls, tables and mantelpieces. Sean's wife Sally has a rose named for her, `Sally Mac' (an apricot-and-yellow floribunda that can be seen in Powerscourt Gardens), as do each of his daughters and granddaughters. And in his secret office, tucked away in a corner between house and garden, a beautiful book The Glory Of The Rose by Lotte Gunthart, lies open "like the book of Kells" at a different page each day. "I pick a rose depending on my mood." On the day I visited he was in a `Golden Wings' sort of mood, which seemed promising, as this is an open-faced, sunshine-yellow rose, bred in the USA in the 1950s, with a sweet scent and few thorns. Sean McCann's own firstbred was also a sunny, yellow specimen, and it is still in the garden (and still unnamed, which seems sad). Remarkably, the big, buttery, single bloom is as different as anything from its busy, multi-petalled parents, the brash `Crimson Glory' and the goldbacked, scarlet `Piccadilly' - which perfectly illustrates the wonder and attraction of rosebreeding. When crossing hybrid with hybrid "you never know what you're going to get", or what shy gene might decide to out itself.
Since he fostered that earliest offspring many seasons ago, McCann has continued to mate rose with rose. In the beginning he sought to create the perfect hybrid tea for exhibition on the show benches, and later he moved into breeding miniatures. Over the years his international reputation grew and grew. He now has 30 named roses on sale worldwide (although none in Ireland, alas) including the delicate orangey `Crazy Dottie', the pure white `Swansong' and the candy pink `Stolen Moment'. He is honorary vice-president of the British Royal National Rose Society and the winner of a wheelbarrow load of important medals and awards. Recently the eager breeder has been pursuing a new type of climbing rose, having been inspired by a neighbour's clematis blossom. "When I saw her clematis I thought: `Why don't we have roses like clematis: big single flowers like `Nelly Moser'. So I started a scheme of breeding."
But where does all this important work happen? In a vast range of glittering glasshouses? In a utilitarian polytunnel? No, it goes on in an ordinary domestic greenhouse, just 12 feet by eight, its earth floor pounded into hardness by years of concentrated feet. Here are hundreds of brand-new, nameless seedlings, the result of last year's crosses. The seed was collected from the hips in October, stored in the bottom of the fridge in damp paper in plastic bags and sowed in January. Some of the seedlings, only an inch or two high, are already flowering - and looking promising.
And here also is the first progeny of the big-single-flower experiment - out of the bourbon rose `Variegata di Bologna' and an unremembered pollen-donor - a generous pink-and-white single. But because he is not happy with its modest number of flowers, McCann is putting it to stud with a more floriferous sire. And so it goes in this little, aluminium-framed greenhouse, where new members of the most fragrant and sensual of all plant families are brought into being - with pollen from a saucer applied by the careful fingers of their creator. Now that the big single climber is evolving nicely, maybe it's only a matter of time before Sean McCann concocts something a bit more challenging. What about that Aquatic Rose? Or perhaps the Blue Rose?