What’s old is new again with old garden roses. These wonderful old beauties, around since before 1867, have started gaining in popularity again after decades of declining interest. That’s because these wonderful bloomers offer striking beauty, comely fragrance and a romantic link to the past.
Old garden roses boast marvelous scents and include very double flower forms.
Photo Credit: ©2001 Dolezal Publishing/John M. Rickard
Wild (or species) roses are very hardy when planted in hardiness zones that match their native region, and they’re great for creating arresting floral displays!
Photo Credit: ©2001 Dolezal Publishing/John M. Rickard
Victorian gardeners found ‘Cécile Brünner’ to be a great match for their gardens: It’s rugged (often surviving long after a house has weathered and fallen), fragrant and plentiful in its blooms.
Photo Credit: ©2001 Dolezal Publishing/Jacqueline Ramseyer
Heritage roses are growing in popularity, too. This group describes old European varieties, several of the species roses, as well as tea, China and wild roses. Planting these historic species and cultivars in your yard is practically a history lesson brought to life. One can bend down to a damask rose to drink in its intoxicating dusky scent and imagine toga-clad Roman and Greek women of times long ago and places far away.
Here’s a bit about some of these wonderful roses:
Alba: Tall, upright, hardy plants bearing delicate foliage and many thorns, with nonrecurring, fragrant blooms in late spring.
Bourbon: Natural hybrid first found on Reunion Island, popular in 1800s France. Tall, upright plants bear recurrent, ruffled, pendulous blooms.
Centifolia: With blooms of 100 or more petals, they are aptly called “cabbage roses.” Most flowers are white, pink or violet in hue.
China: Wild, naturally semidouble and double blooms, recurrent flowering roses first introduced to Europe from the Orient.
Damask: Tight-petaled, intensely fragrant, ancient garden roses dating to pre-Roman times.
Gallica: Another ancient type and easy to grow. Blooms are usually red- or violet-hued and fragrant. (Dried petals are especially fragrant.)
Moss: The most popular Victorian-era rose. They bear buds encased in moss-like, pine-scented mantles that open to saucer-shaped blooms packed with fringed petals.
Noisette: Imported from a US start and developed by French rosarians in the 1800s, they bear recurrent, clustered blooms of glorious, soft, fragrant and wavy petals.
Portland: A tiny class (only a few dozen remain) of very hardy, recurrent blooming roses with very double, fragrant and mounded blooms.
Rosa spinosissima: Ancient Scottish shrub roses dating to the 15th century. They bear large, single, cream-colored blooms on hardy, tough foliage.
So transform your garden into a walk through history, and get to know your heritage (and old garden) roses.
