A Rose Tree Rooted in Love

THE TOMBSTONE ROSE TREE

ONE OF THE FEW CONSTANTS IN Mary Gee's life was her love of Lady Banksia roses. It's a love that still blossoms today at Tombstone's Rose Tree Inn and Museum, where a small cutting Mary helped plant 112 years ago continues to thrive as the world's largest rose tree.

Mary's story began in 1884 when a Scotsman named Henry Gee arrived in London. He was an engineer for Tombstone's Old Guard Mining Company sent overseas to purchase equipment for the firm's use in Arizona Territory.

But Henry's routine business trip was interrupted when he met a pretty Scottish woman named Mary Barr. Her husband had died a short time before, leaving her with two small children.

Now that act of fate was followed by another: Henry and Mary fell in love.

After a whirlwind romance of three weeks, Henry proposed, Mary accepted, and the couple journeyed to Tombstone to begin a new life together. The children stayed in London with Mary's parents until arrangements could be made for their overseas passage.

"I often wonder what it must've been like for Mary to go from London to Tombstone," says Dorothy Devere, the owner, along with her husband, Burton, of the Rose Tree Inn and Museum. "I can't imagine making that kind of a change in the 1880s."

Upon arriving in Tombstone, the Gees decided to build a house on Richmond Ridge about a mile south of town. For several months during its construction, they lived at the Rose Tree Inn, then known as the Cochise House.

Mary and proprietor Amelia Adamson developed a close friendship, something the new bride desperately needed to ease her homesickness.

Her parents in London tried to do the same by sending Mary a box of shrubs native to Scotland, including several rooted shoots of the Lady Banksia rose.

"There wasn't much growing in the dry ground around Tombstone, and she missed having flowers to tend," says Devere. "She especially missed the Lady Banksias which were so common around her home in Kilmarnock, Scotland.

Mary gave one of the Lady Banksia cuttings to her new friend Amelia, and in 1885 the two women planted it on the patio of the Cochise House, hoping it would climb the side of a woodshed.

But within a few short years, the bush had grown so big it almost toppled the shed. Several times the patio had to be altered to accommodate the thriving tree.

Word of Mary's Lady Banksia spread. In 1933 newspaperman John Hix became the first to call it the world's largest rosebush in his "Strange As It Seems" column for the McNaught Syndicate.

That designation attracted the eye of Robert Ripley of "Ripley's Believe It or Not." He stayed at the inn for a week in 1937, and was so enthralled with the hearty plant that he, too, included it in his syndicated column.

The Guinness Book of Records still calls the Lady Banksia the world's largest rosebush, and it sends a representative to Tombstone every few years to update the listing. "To my knowledge, it's never been disputed," says Devere.

The tree covers nearly 8,000 square feet, measures more than 12 feet around at its base, and is heavy enough to require the support of dozens of posts and pipes.

Between mid-March and mid-April, the tree sprouts so many white blossoms that it looks like a snowstorm, and their scent sweetens the air all over town.

A man drawn by a whiff of the blossoms recently showed up at Devere's door one of about 20,000 visitors the inn attracts every year after riding a horse-drawn stagecoach through the streets.

He laughed as he said to Devere, "Any rosebush that I can smell over those horses, I have to come see."

The growth of the tree continues even though it has never been fertilized. It requires only heavy watering during the summer and a pruning every winter which produces several truckloads of dead brush.

"We don't really know why it's thrived so well," says Devere. "We know there is water under Tombstone from the flooding of the mines, and it could be that the plant has a taproot. But that's just a theory."

As with any story that originated in Tombstone in the 1880s, the Lady Banksia has been the subject of numerous myths.

Devere attributes these, in part, to the long list of writers who stayed at the inn through the years, including Stuart Lake (Wyatt Earp's biographer), Walter Noble Burns, Frank Waters, and onetime Tombstone lawman Billy Breakenridge, the author of Helldorado.

The most common tale traces the tree's beginning to the famed stage performer Lotta Crabtree, who supposedly tossed a red rose out the window of her dressing room after her performance of Carmen at the Bird Cage Theatre. Crabtree's rose landed on the boardinghouse patio and somehow took root.

But that oft-repeated story is undoubtedly false, considering that the theater's dressing rooms were in the basement, and the Lady Banksia is a white rose not red. It's also unlikely that Crabtree ever performed at the Bird Cage, which endures two blocks from the inn. (See Arizona Highways, September '96.) Devere shakes her head at such crazy tales and keeps records from the inn's early days to ensure that the true story of Mary Gee is never lost.

For 20 years, the lonesome Scottish bride made her home in Tombstone, the town that seemed so strange to her in 1884. Mary died in 1905 at age 50 and is buried in the town cemetery.

As for Henry Gee, history seems to have lost track of him. A newspaper reported that he was a passenger on the Titanic when it went down in the north Atlantic in April, 1912.

If true, it was probably a good thing that Mary was gone by then, and thus spared the agony of losing a second love to the sea. (Her first husband's ship also had sunk.) But the story is hazy and difficult to confirm. The Titanic's passenger records do state that one of those killed was named Gee. But it was Arthur H. Gee not Henry M., and he was from Blackpool, England, not Scotland. Perhaps it's another of those Tombstone myths.

No such doubt surrounds the tale of Mary Gee. Her legacy is the great white Lady Banksia, a still-thriving reminder of a young woman's love.

Author's Note: Tombstone's Rose Tree Inn and Museum is located at the corner of Fourth and Toughnut streets. Admission to tour the historic home and see the rose tree is $2, adults; free, 14 and under. For more information, call (520) 457-3326.