Fabulous Floribundas

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Robert J. Dolezal

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You’ll get bunches or beautiful blooms all season from a floribunda.

If you’re looking for clusters of colorful blooms on a rose, think floribunda. These beautiful bunches of roses – each of hybrid tea dimension – have an open form and are borne on compact, upright bushes. What’s more, the color lasts and lasts, as the bushes repeatedly flush in waves of color throughout the gardening season.

The floribunda class of roses wasn’t established until the 1940s, but the work on them began much earlier, as growers cross-hybridized hybrid tea roses and polyanthas to create a midsized plant with multiple blooms on each stem. The earliest example of this modern rose class (dating to 1909) is Rosa ‘Grüss an Aachen’. These so-called “hybrid polyanthas” quickly gained popularity among gardeners, beginning a rapid proliferation in the 1920s that continues today.

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Floribundas are the roses of choice for colorful landscape plantings. Their clustered blooms progress in waves of color down the branching canes, providing weeks of nonstop floral display.

Floribundas feature high-centered blooms, as well as the traditional saucer-shaped, open form of earlier rose varieties. Like their hybrid tea parents, a wide variety of color choices exist, including white, red, orange, yellow, salmon, pink, mauve and purple, as well as multihued blooms. In addition to the wonderful colors, there’s another bonus with this class: enhanced disease resistance. In fact, the American Rose Society (and other rose organizations) have selected a number of floribunda cultivars for awards after extensive growing trials in varied climates.

Because floribundas are so visually striking, they’re the perfect choice for colorful beds and borders. Use these types of roses as hedges or to line pathways in the garden to take advantage of their primary strengths: limited care, numerous blooms, repeat waves of flowers, dense foliage and compact growth habit. Plant grouped sets to increase the individual plants’ impact, making a dramatic statement in your yard. And thanks to their showy bouquets of blooms, floribundas are the perfect choice for any sunny spot that simply needs true flower power.

Facts

Floribundas are a good choice to include in a cutting garden: The plants provide a continual stream of sprays or long-stemmed, single blooms for household floral arrangements and gifts, without reducing the beauty of your landscape. (Some varieties, however, are more productive than others.)
Floribundas are more cold-tolerant than many other rose classes and are a good option for people who garden in areas with cold winters.

Tips

Space your roses properly to keep diseases like black spot at bay.
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When planning your rose garden, choose those rose varieties that fit your specific goals, space and climate. If your goal is a spectacular, season-long show of blooms, pick a floribunda that will produce flushes from spring through fall.

Faqs

Q: Why are floribundas disease-resistant?
A: Growers graft most modern floribunda roses onto hardy rootstock, providing very sturdy, disease-resistant plants that retain their colorful blooms and lush foliage. (Grafted plants may require protection in areas with the coldest climates, however.)

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