There is no plant that rewards the serious gardener more completely, or punishes the inattentive one more swiftly, than the rose. It is simultaneously the most forgiving and the most exacting subject in horticulture — ancient beyond reckoning, endlessly renewed, and capable, at its best, of a beauty so concentrated and so complex that it defies every attempt at adequate description. This is an attempt anyway.
Why the Rose Is Different
Every experienced gardener has, at some point, tried to explain to a non-gardening friend why roses are different from other plants. Why they occupy a category of their own. Why serious rosarians — people who have grown every other genus of flowering plant with skill and discrimination — eventually find themselves drawn back, repeatedly and with increasing obsession, to this one genus above all others. The explanation is always inadequate, because the qualities that make the rose different are not, individually, unique to it. Other plants are fragrant. Other plants are beautiful. Other plants have complex histories and rich cultural associations. What makes the rose different is that it possesses all of these qualities simultaneously, and to a depth that no other plant approaches.
The rose has been cultivated, written about, painted, distilled, and argued over for at least five thousand years. It appears in the oldest surviving medical texts, in the earliest love poetry, in the paintings of ancient Egypt and Rome and medieval Flanders. It has been the symbol of rival royal dynasties, the attribute of the Virgin Mary, the badge of secular love, the source of the most commercially important natural fragrance in the world. It has been bred, crossed, selected, and hybridised to a degree that no other ornamental plant has experienced, producing in the process a range of forms, colours, growth habits, and flowering characteristics that constitutes one of the great achievements of applied horticultural science. And it has, despite everything that intensive breeding has done to it, retained — in its best expressions — a quality of wildness, of genuine natural presence, that the most artificed cultivar never entirely conceals.
This guide approaches the rose through the senses rather than the catalogue. It is organised around what the rose does to the person who encounters it: what it smells like, what it looks like, how it performs across the seasons, and what forms it achieves in the greatest rose gardens of the world. It is, above all, a guide to specific plants in specific places — to the cultivars and gardens that represent each quality at its absolute peak, and that are worth planning a journey around, a diary reorganised, a flight booked.
Because that is what the great rose gardens of the world deserve. Not a quick visit on the way to somewhere else. Not a photograph taken through a locked gate. But a proper, unhurried morning in June when the light is right and the dew is still on the petals and the fragrance is rising and you have nowhere else to be.
This is the guide that earns that morning.
Part One: Fragrance — The Rose’s First and Greatest Gift
Understanding Rose Fragrance
Let us begin with the most important thing. Before the colour, before the form, before the extraordinary horticultural achievement of a well-grown specimen in full flush — there is the fragrance. It is the quality that has made the rose the most culturally significant plant in the world, the quality that the perfume industry has spent centuries and billions of pounds attempting to capture and replicate, and the quality that, in the finest old roses on a warm June morning, stops you as completely as any experience that the natural world provides.
Rose fragrance is not one thing. This is the first and most important piece of horticultural knowledge to carry into any rose garden: the genus Rosa produces a range of fragrance compounds of extraordinary chemical diversity, and the different fragrance types — which rosarians have historically classified into seven broad categories — are genuinely distinct in character, origin, and intensity. Understanding these categories changes how you experience a rose garden, because it transforms the passive experience of pleasant smell into the active, intellectually engaged practice of identification and comparison that is one of the great pleasures of serious horticulture.
The classic old rose fragrance — the one that most people mean when they describe a rose as fragrant — is dominated by a compound called beta-damascenone, named for the damask rose (Rosa × damascena) in which it was first identified. It is the fragrance of the great old European roses — the gallicas, the damasks, the albas, the centifolias — and it is, in its finest expressions, one of the most complex natural fragrances produced by any plant: rich, deep, slightly spiced, with a sweetness that is never cloying and a depth that continues to reveal itself over hours rather than minutes. Rosa × damascena ‘Trigintipetala’ — the rose grown in Bulgaria’s Kazanlak Valley for the production of rose otto, the essential oil used in perfumery — is the commercial source of this fragrance compound, and a single gramme of genuine Bulgarian rose otto requires approximately three to five tonnes of fresh petals to produce. This fact alone communicates something important about the intensity of the fragrance in the living flower.
The tea fragrance — present in the tea roses and their descendants, the hybrid teas — is a different compound entirely: a fresh, slightly sharp, slightly metallic scent reminiscent of a freshly opened tea chest that is, to some noses, more interesting than the classic old rose fragrance precisely because it is less overtly sweet. Rosa × odorata and its cultivars carry this fragrance most purely; in the hybrid teas, it has been diluted and modified by crossing, and only the best-bred modern roses retain it at meaningful intensity. ‘Lady Hillingdon’, a climbing tea rose of 1917 whose apricot-buff flowers are among the most beautiful in the climbing rose palette, has the tea fragrance in its most developed and recognisable form — a scent that is impossible to mistake once you have learned to identify it.
The myrrh fragrance is rarer and more distinctive than either of the above, and rosarians who encounter it for the first time in the work of David Austin tend to become obsessed with it. It is anise-like, slightly medicinal, warm and complex, and it derives from the compound anisaldehyde rather than the damascenone group. Austin’s rose ‘Heritage’ was among the first of his introductions to carry this fragrance prominently, and ‘Constance Spry’ — technically a shrub rose rather than a climber, though it is too large and too flexible in its stems to be used as anything other than a climber or wall plant — carries it with an intensity that makes it one of the most distinctive fragrance experiences available in the rose garden. The myrrh-scented roses tend to carry the fragrance most strongly in warm weather, when the anisaldehyde volatilises freely from the petal surface, and least strongly in cool, damp conditions — a phenological detail worth knowing when planning a visit.
The fruit fragrances — present in a range of cultivars and species, in forms that include raspberry, blackcurrant, apple, banana, and lychee — are the most surprising and the most variable in the rose genus. Rosa roxburghii — the chestnut rose — carries a strong apple fragrance from both its flowers and its distinctive, chestnut-like fruit. The bourbon rose ‘Zéphirine Drouhin’, one of the most useful of all climbing roses for its thornless stems and its ability to perform on a north-facing wall, carries a raspberry fragrance of considerable strength and clarity. Rosa rubiginosa — the sweet briar or eglantine — has its fragrance not in the flower but in the leaf: bruised or wet foliage releases a sharp, green apple scent that is one of the most distinctive in the entire genus, and a sweet briar hedge after rain in June is a fragrance experience available nowhere else in horticulture.
The violet fragrance — produced by the compound ionone, which is also responsible for the characteristic scent of violets — is present in the Parma violets and some hybrid perpetuals, and is sufficiently distinct from the classic old rose fragrance to be worth identifying separately. ‘Reine des Violettes’, a hybrid perpetual of 1860 whose large, flat, quartered flowers of purple-violet retain the old rose form at its most architecturally resolved, carries this fragrance with considerable intensity — particularly in the morning, when the ionone content of the petal surface is highest.
The musk fragrance — the characteristic scent of the musk roses and their hybrid descendants — is the most volatile and the most environmentally dependent of all rose fragrance types: produced by the stamens and anthers rather than the petals, and therefore carried on the air at a distance from the plant rather than released only when the nose is brought close to the flower. The hybrid musks — ‘Buff Beauty’, ‘Cornelia’, ‘Penelope’, ‘Felicia’ — carry this fragrance as a kind of ambient atmosphere around the plant in warm, still weather, detectable from several metres away and intensifying in the heat of late afternoon. Standing downwind of a well-grown ‘Buff Beauty’ in July, when the plant is in its second flush and the evening is warm and still, is one of the most pleasurable fragrance experiences available in the temperate garden.
The World’s Greatest Fragrance Destinations
The Valley of the Roses, Bulgaria — Kazanlak, Karlovo, and the Rose Fields of the Balkan Foothills
There is nowhere in the world where the fragrance of roses is experienced at greater intensity or in a more extraordinary landscape context than the Kazanlak Valley in the foothills of the Balkan Mountains in central Bulgaria. This narrow valley — running some one hundred and thirty kilometres between the Balkan range to the north and the Sredna Gora hills to the south, its microclimate uniquely suited to the cultivation of Rosa × damascena ‘Trigintipetala’ — has been the centre of the world’s rose oil industry since the seventeenth century, and during the three weeks of the harvest season in late May and early June it produces a concentration of rose fragrance that is, frankly, almost impossible to convey in words.
The harvest begins at dawn. Pickers work through the early morning hours — the window between the opening of the flowers and the point at which the essential oil content of the petals begins to decrease with rising temperature — moving through rows of roses in a silence broken only by the sound of petals being gathered into cloth sacks. The fragrance at this hour, in this valley, with the mountain mist still lying in the lower ground and the light coming at a low angle across the rose fields, is of such concentrated richness that experienced visitors — people who have grown roses for decades, people who have spent careers in the perfume industry — describe it as genuinely transformative. It is the fragrance of the finest rose otto, which is to say the basis of the finest rose perfumes, experienced in its living, undistilled form at a concentration no indoor perfumery can approach.
The rose-growing villages of the valley — Kazanlak, Karlovo, Kalofer, Rosa — hold their rose festivals in the first week of June, and the combination of the festival atmosphere, the extraordinary landscape, and the fragrance of several hundred hectares of flowering Rosa × damascena makes this one of the most remarkable horticultural tourism experiences in the world. The Damascena Distillery at Sevtopolis, which runs guided tours of its traditional copper alembic distillation process during the harvest period, is the best single destination for visitors who want to understand how the fragrance moves from petal to product.
Grasse, Provence, France
The town of Grasse in the Alpes-Maritimes above the Côte d’Azur has been the centre of the European perfume industry since the eighteenth century, its microclimate — protected from cold winds, sunny and warm but not excessively hot — suited to the cultivation of the rose varieties required for perfumery. The Centifolia rose — Rosa × centifolia, the rose de mai of the Grasse tradition — is the primary cultivar grown for perfumery in the region, its deeply fragrant, heavily-petalled flowers harvested in May for absolute production (a cold-solvent extraction process that captures volatile fragrance compounds lost in steam distillation).
The rose fields of Grasse are less extensive than they once were — the competition of cheaper Bulgarian and Turkish rose production has reduced French cultivation substantially — but the May Roses Festival celebrates the harvest with considerable style, and the town’s great perfume houses — Fragonard, Molinard, Galimard — offer tours that include, in season, the opportunity to see and smell fresh centifolia roses in the context of their transformation into perfume. The Musée International de la Parfumerie in Grasse, recently renovated and one of the finest specialist museums in Europe, provides the essential cultural and scientific context for understanding what makes rose fragrance the most commercially important natural scent material in the world.
Roseraie du Val-de-Marne, L’Haÿ-les-Roses, France
The largest and most historically important rose collection in France — arguably in the world — was created by Jules Gravereaux from 1894 onward at the Paris suburb of L’Haÿ-les-Roses, and it remains, more than a century after its founding, one of the essential destinations for anyone serious about the rose. The collection spans the full historical range from wild species to the most recently bred modern cultivars, and its particular strength — and its greatest fragrance resource — lies in the extraordinary representation of old European roses: the gallicas, damasks, albas, centifolias, mosses, and Bourbon roses that constitute the fragrant core of the rose genus’s cultivated history.
The gallica section in June, when the once-flowering old roses are at their peak, is the finest fragrance experience available in any managed rose collection. Rosa gallica ‘Officinalis’ — the apothecary’s rose, one of the oldest cultivated roses in existence — flowers here in company with ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’, ‘Tuscany Superb’, ‘Charles de Mills’, ‘Duc de Guiche’, and dozens of other gallica cultivars whose combined fragrance on a warm June morning is of an intensity and complexity that the finest perfumery can suggest but never fully replicate. Go early, before the coach parties arrive. Bring more time than you think you need.
Mottisfont Abbey, Hampshire, England
The National Collection of pre-1900 roses held by the National Trust at Mottisfont Abbey in the Test Valley constitutes, in its walled garden setting, one of the most complete fragrance experiences available in the British Isles. The collection — assembled primarily through the work of the rosarian Graham Stuart Thomas, who was garden adviser to the National Trust from 1956 to 1974 and whose knowledge of old roses was unmatched in his generation — includes virtually every significant old European rose variety in cultivation, as well as an extensive representation of early hybrid perpetuals, hybrid teas, and Bourbon roses.
The walled garden at Mottisfont reaches its peak in mid-June, and at that moment — on a still, warm evening when the day’s accumulated heat is rising from the brick walls and the fragrance of several hundred old roses is hanging in the enclosed air — it is, by wide consensus among those who know rose gardens, the finest fragrance experience in England. Thomas’s planting design, which grouped the roses by class and managed the colour and form transitions between groups with the eye of an experienced plantsman and colourist, gives the garden a coherence and a logic that makes it as instructive as it is beautiful. The abbey itself — a twelfth-century Augustinian priory converted to a country house, its grounds running down to the River Test — provides a historical setting of considerable beauty, and the combination of ancient building, walled garden, and June roses is one of those rare compositions that meets every expectation and then exceeds it.
Part Two: Colour — The Extraordinary Palette of the Rose
The Rose’s Colour Revolution
No other flowering plant genus has undergone a comparable transformation in its colour range across the period of its cultivation. The wild roses of the temperate world are, overwhelmingly, pink — the five-petalled, single-flowered, softly fragrant pink of Rosa canina, Rosa rubiginosa, Rosa arvensis, and the dozens of related species that colonise hedgerows, forest margins, and mountain slopes from the Atlantic coast to the Himalayas. This pinkness — the original, ancestral colour of the rose — remains the dominant tone of the old European roses: the gallicas range from light pink through deep crimson to purple; the damasks from blush-white to rich rose-pink; the albas from pure white through the palest imaginable pink. Beautiful, extraordinarily varied within a relatively narrow tonal range, but essentially pink.
The colour revolution came from the East. The introduction of Chinese roses — Rosa chinensis and its relatives — to European cultivation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought with it two colour qualities entirely absent from the European rose palette: a range of warm yellows and warm oranges, and a crimson of a different quality from the European crimson — cleaner, more intensely pigmented, without the blue-purple overtones of the gallica reds. When European breeders crossed the Chinese roses with their existing varieties, the resulting hybrids — the Bourbon roses, the hybrid perpetuals, the hybrid teas — began to produce colours previously unavailable in the genus: apricot, copper, flame, salmon, and eventually the full-spectrum yellows and oranges of the modern rose palette.
The yellows arrived through a different route: the discovery and introduction of Rosa foetida ‘Bicolor’ and Rosa foetida ‘Persiana’ — the Austrian copper and the Persian yellow, despite their common names both originating in the Middle East — which introduced the yellow pigment carotenoid into European rose breeding. The French breeder Joseph Pernet-Ducher used Rosa foetida ‘Persiana’ to produce ‘Soleil d’Or’ in 1900 — the first genuinely yellow garden rose and the ancestor of virtually every yellow, apricot, orange, and flame-coloured rose grown today. The cost of this colour expansion was, unfortunately, significant: Rosa foetida carries susceptibility to the fungal disease black spot (Diplocarpon rosae), and this susceptibility was transferred to many of its descendants, making the warm-coloured modern roses disproportionately prone to a disease that the old European roses, bred without Rosa foetida in their ancestry, largely avoided.
The colour range of the contemporary rose spans, with complete coverage, from pure white through every gradation of cream, blush, pink, coral, salmon, apricot, orange, yellow, red, crimson, and deep purple-maroon. The only colour not yet achieved is a true blue — the pigment delphinidin, which produces the blue of delphiniums and hydrangeas, is absent from the genus Rosa’s genetic repertoire, and despite sustained attempts to introduce it through conventional breeding and genetic modification, no genuinely blue rose yet exists. The so-called “blue” roses available in the trade — ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, ‘Blue Moon’, ‘Blue for You’ — are in reality purple, lilac, or mauve, and while they are beautiful plants, they are not blue in the way that a gentian or a larkspur is blue.
Colour by Class: A Horticultural Colour Guide
White and Cream: Purity in the Rose Garden
The white roses constitute one of the most distinguished groups in the entire genus, and their range — from the clear, cold white of ‘Iceberg’ and the old alba ‘Alba Semiplena’ to the warm, creamy white of ‘Climbing Madame Alfred Carrière’ and the ivory-yellow of ‘Albéric Barbier’ — is wider and more nuanced than the single designation suggests.
The alba roses — Rosa × alba and its cultivars — are the canonical white roses of the European tradition, and they are among the finest garden plants in any genus. ‘Alba Semiplena’ — thought by some to be the White Rose of York of the Wars of the Roses, though the historical identification is uncertain — has flowers of such simple, concentrated beauty that every comparison with more elaborate cultivars tends to resolve in its favour: five or seven pure white petals arranged around a boss of golden stamens, the flowers borne in clusters on arching stems of blue-green foliage, the whole plant possessing a freshness and clarity that the most complex double rose cannot approach. The fragrance is outstanding — clean, sweet, with the classic old rose depth rather than the cloying sweetness that inferior whites sometimes produce.
‘Madame Hardy’, a damask rose of 1832 and by very wide consensus among rosarians one of the most beautiful roses ever bred, produces flowers of such perfect form — pure white, deeply double, with a characteristic green pip (button eye) at the centre, the petals reflexing into a perfect cup — that it remains, nearly two centuries after its introduction, the standard by which all white old roses are measured. It has no reblooming capacity — it flowers once, in June, for approximately three weeks — and this limitation matters not at all when the flowers it produces in that period are of this quality.
The Destination for White Roses: Bagatelle Rose Garden, Paris
The Roseraie de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne — created in 1905 by the landscape architect Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier and expanded substantially since — holds one of the world’s finest collections of white and near-white roses, its annual competition for new rose varieties (running since 1907) having introduced some of the most important cultivars of the twentieth century. The white rose beds, arranged in the garden’s formal southern section, represent virtually every significant white cultivar from the albas through the modern floribundas and climbing roses, and the combination of formal French garden architecture — clipped allées, stone balustrades, classical statuary — with the quiet, concentrated beauty of white roses in their June peak is one of the most composed horticultural experiences in Europe.
Pink: The Original and Still the Greatest
The pink roses comprise the largest single colour group in the genus, and within the range of pink available — from the palest imaginable blush through coral, salmon, rose-pink, deep cerise, and the hot, almost magenta pinks of certain David Austin introductions — lies the greatest concentration of excellent rose cultivars at every class and period of the genus’s breeding history.
‘Fantin-Latour’ — named for the French painter whose great rose paintings of the 1870s constitute the finest sustained artistic engagement with the flower in the Western tradition — produces flowers of such perfect, full-petalled, blush-pink beauty that it has become the standard reference for the aesthetic of the old rose in its most fully realised form. The flowers open from a cupped bud into a fully reflexed, many-petalled bloom of soft rose-pink that fades at the petal edges toward almost white, each flower a composition of such complexity and delicacy that close examination becomes genuinely absorbing. It is a once-flowering shrub rose of considerable vigour, and it is at its best — as Fantin-Latour’s paintings suggest — when cut and brought indoors, where the fragrance fills a room and the detail of the flower is visible at the close range that the garden does not always permit.
‘Gertrude Jekyll’ — David Austin’s 1986 introduction named for the great garden designer — carries what is, in the opinion of many rosarians, the finest fragrance of any Austin rose: a deep, rich, classic old rose fragrance of enormous strength and complexity, combined with flowers of rich warm pink, quartered and cupped in the old rose style, on a shrub of considerable vigour. It is a rose that divides opinion on its garden behaviour — it is tall, thorny, and prone to sprawling in a way that requires management — but no one who has experienced it in full fragrance on a warm June morning disputes its quality.
The Destination for Pink Roses: David Austin Rose Gardens, Albrighton, Shropshire, England
The display gardens at David Austin Roses’ nursery at Albrighton in Shropshire constitute the finest single collection of Austin’s English roses in existence, and in June they represent one of the most intensively beautiful rose experiences available anywhere in the world. The gardens, redesigned and expanded over recent years, contain over seven hundred varieties grown in display beds of considerable quality, the planting managed to demonstrate each variety at its best and to create a succession of colour and fragrance that sustains across the full season from early June through October.
The June peak — when the once-flowering old roses are in full bloom simultaneously with the first flush of the repeat-flowering English roses — is the essential visit, and early morning is the essential time of day: the fragrance in the enclosed garden spaces at this moment, before the day’s heat has burned off the volatile compounds from the petal surfaces, is quite simply the finest available in any rose garden in England. The nursery’s commitment to plant quality — every variety grown on its own roots where possible, the displays maintained to a standard that reflects the company’s awareness that they are showing the very best their breeding has achieved — gives the visit an instructive quality that makes it as useful to the working gardener as to the rose enthusiast.
Red: The Most Demanding and Most Rewarding Colour
Red roses are simultaneously the most culturally iconic and the most horticulturally challenging of all rose colours. The demand for red roses — driven by the Valentine’s Day cut flower market into a commercial obsession that has produced hundreds of millions of red roses annually, virtually all of them bred for commercial production rather than garden performance or fragrance — has created a category of red rose that represents the worst of what intensive breeding for commercial traits can do to a garden plant: scentless, disease-prone, stiff, and almost entirely without the garden qualities that make the rose worth growing.
The best red roses, however, are among the finest in the genus. The gallica rose ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’ — a deep, velvety purple-crimson that darkens toward slate-blue at the petal edges as the flower ages, its quartered blooms carried in clusters on gracefully arching stems — is one of those roses that makes every other red seem somehow inadequate by comparison: its colour is unique in the rose world, its fragrance is outstanding, and its form is as perfect as any old rose achieves. It flowers once, in June, and it is worth growing for that single performance.
‘Tuscany Superb’ — another gallica, of ancient origin, its deep crimson-purple flowers semi-double, their golden stamens displayed prominently against the dark petals — carries the old rose fragrance at its most intense and most complex, and its colour — a true crimson with deep violet overtones that no paint or printer’s ink quite captures — is the standard against which all other dark reds are measured.
For repeat-flowering red, ‘Falstaff’ (David Austin, 1999) carries the deepest crimson of all the English roses, its flowers deeply cupped, many-petalled, richly fragrant, on a shrub of moderate size and reasonable disease resistance. It is not the most vigorous of Austin’s introductions, but its colour — in the right light, particularly the low angle of late afternoon sun — is of such intensity and depth that it justifies the additional attention its management requires.
The Destination for Red Roses: Sangerhausen Rosarium, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
The Europa-Rosarium at Sangerhausen in Saxony-Anhalt is, by number of cultivars, the largest rose collection in the world: some 8,700 varieties covering the full historical and taxonomic range of the genus, including a representation of species roses, old European roses, and nineteenth-century hybrid perpetuals and hybrid teas that surpasses every other collection in existence. The red rose collections here — spanning the full range from the early gallica reds and the nineteenth-century hybrid perpetuals (whose dark, velvety crimson represented the peak of red rose breeding before the introduction of the fully modern hybrid tea) to contemporary introductions — constitute the most comprehensive single resource for understanding the history and development of the red rose in cultivation.
The hybrid perpetual collection is Sangerhausen’s particular glory and the primary reason that serious rosarians make the pilgrimage to this somewhat out-of-the-way destination in central Germany. The hybrid perpetuals — bred primarily in France and England between roughly 1840 and 1900, the dominant rose class of the Victorian period, largely supplanted by the hybrid teas in the early twentieth century and now grown primarily in specialist collections — include some of the finest dark red roses ever bred: ‘Général Jacqueminot’ (1853), whose crimson flowers provided the standard for red rose fragrance for half a century; ‘Baron Girod de l’Ain’ (1897), whose crimson petals are edged in white, a curiosity of such charm and distinction that it remains worth seeking out; ‘Hugh Dickson’ (1905), one of the last great hybrid perpetuals, its deep crimson flowers produced with remarkable generosity on a vigorous, tall shrub that rewards hard pruning.
Yellow and Apricot: The Warm Spectrum
The yellow and apricot roses — descendants of Rosa foetida and the China roses, their warm tones the product of carotenoid pigments introduced into European breeding at the turn of the twentieth century — contain within their range some of the most beautiful and most distinctive cultivars in the genus. They are also, for reasons already discussed, disproportionately prone to black spot, and the serious yellow rose grower must decide early whether to engage in the preventive spray programme that keeps the foliage clean through the season or to accept the disfigurement of black spot as the price of the colour it enables.
‘Climbing Lady Hillingdon’ — a sport of the bush ‘Lady Hillingdon’, introduced as a climber in 1917 — has apricot-buff flowers of such delicate, tea-fragrant beauty that it remains, a century after its introduction, the standard for climbing roses of this colour. The flowers open from elegant, pointed buds of deep apricot into loosely double, semi-nodding blooms of warm yellow-buff whose colour fades gracefully as they age, each stage of the flower’s development of equal beauty. On a warm, sheltered wall — it needs protection from cold winds — it produces from June through October a display of such sustained quality that it is difficult to imagine the wall without it.
‘Graham Thomas’ (David Austin, 1983) — named for the great rosarian and one of Austin’s earliest and most enduring introductions — carries a clear, pure yellow rare in the old-rose-style cultivar, its deeply cupped, many-petalled flowers of rich butter-yellow produced with generosity from June through October, the fragrance strong and carrying well on the air. It is an opinionated rose — tall, vigorous, insistent in its colour in a way that requires careful positioning in the border — but grown in the right context, against stone or with silver-leaved companions, it is one of the most beautiful of all Austin’s roses.
The Destination for Yellow and Apricot Roses: Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Kent, England
The rose garden at Sissinghurst Castle — created by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson from 1930 onward and now one of the most visited gardens in Britain — does not focus exclusively on yellow and apricot roses, but the tower lawn and the moat walk contain a rose planting of such quality, and the combination of old copper-crimson and apricot roses with the warm brick of the Tudor walls and towers provides a colour harmony of such authority, that it earns its place in any discussion of the finest rose colour compositions in the world.
The Sissinghurst rose that most defines the garden’s particular colour aesthetic is ‘Climbing Albertine’ — a vigorous rambler of 1921 whose salmon-copper-pink flowers, borne in one extravagant June flush, combine with the warm brick of the walls in a colour relationship that appears, in the right evening light, as close to perfect as horticulture achieves. The fragrance — strong, fruity-sweet, carried on the air at a distance from the plant — adds an olfactory dimension that photographs of the garden, however excellent, cannot convey. The combination of ‘Albertine’, the surrounding old roses, and the architectural framework of the garden — the yew hedges, the brick walls, the oak pergola — is the model for a generation of British rose garden design, and seeing it in person, in the right week of June, remains one of the garden visits that repays a lifetime of planning.
Part Three: Form — The Architecture of the Rose Flower
Understanding Rose Form
The form of the rose flower — the arrangement of its petals, the way it opens from bud to full bloom, the proportions of its cup or saucer or rosette — is as important to the serious rosarian as colour or fragrance, and it is considerably less discussed in the popular rose literature than either. This is a significant omission, because the greatest rose gardens in the world are great not only because of their colour and fragrance but because of the quality of the flowers themselves — the perfection of a well-formed quartered bloom opening in the early morning, the architectural authority of a perfectly shaped bud, the way a well-formed flower holds its form across the full period of its opening rather than collapsing into a blowsy, undistinguished muddle as the petals expand.
Rose flower forms have been classified into a system of nine types by the World Federation of Rose Societies, but for practical horticultural purposes, a simpler taxonomy is more useful. The major forms are: single (five petals, stamens prominently displayed, the simplest and often the most elegant); semi-double (loosely double, the stamens still partially visible, a form of considerable informality and charm); fully double (many petals, stamens concealed, the form most associated with the classic rose in cultural imagery); quartered (the petals arranged in four distinct quadrants around a central eye, the form most characteristic of the old European roses and the Austin English roses); high-centred (the hybrid tea form, with a central cone of upright inner petals surrounded by reflexing outer petals, a form developed specifically for the cut flower market); and pompon (many small, evenly arranged petals in a rounded, button-like form, characteristic of certain miniature and polyantha roses).
Each form has its advocates and its contexts, and a serious rose gardener develops preferences among them based on a combination of aesthetic conviction and practical experience. The quartered old rose form — exemplified by ‘Charles de Mills’, ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’, ‘Fantin-Latour’, and dozens of other cultivars — is the form that most closely approaches the geometric ideal of the rose: its four-part symmetry is as close to mathematical as a living flower achieves, and in the finest examples — a freshly opened ‘Madame Hardy’ or ‘Tuscany Superb’ in the morning light — it produces a sensation in the viewer that is closer to the experience of encountering a great work of art than to the ordinary pleasure of looking at a flower.
The single-flowered rose is the form that serious rosarians return to, repeatedly and with increasing conviction, as they accumulate experience of the genus. The five-petalled flowers of the species roses — Rosa moyesii, with its blood-crimson flowers and magnificent flask-shaped hips; Rosa glauca, with its simple, clear pink flowers and extraordinary blue-grey foliage; Rosa complicata, whose single cerise-pink flowers with a white central eye are among the most generous and free-flowering in the old rose world — have a quality of directness and natural authority that the most elaborate double never quite achieves. They are, in a sense, the truth about what the rose is: the five petals, the ring of stamens, the beginning of the hip that will follow. Everything else is elaboration.
Form in the Landscape: The Rose as Architectural Plant
The form of the rose as a whole plant — its habit, its vigour, its relationship to supporting structures and companion plants — is as important a consideration as the form of the individual flower, and the greatest rose gardens demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of how different rose classes can be used to create spatial effects of considerable architectural quality.
The Climbing Rose on the Pergola: Form at Its Most Dramatic
The rose pergola — a timber, iron, or stone framework over which climbing and rambling roses are trained to create a tunnel or arcade of flower — is the single most dramatic form that rose cultivation takes, and when it is done well it produces an experience of walking through flowering plant material of such concentrated beauty that it has no parallel in any other form of garden design. The roses trained over a well-designed pergola are seen from within, at close range and from below — the flowers hanging overhead, the fragrance concentrated by the enclosure, the light filtered through the foliage and flower canopy into a dappled, rose-coloured luminescence that transforms the quality of the air within the structure.
The Destination for Rose Pergolas: Bagatelle, Paris; Regent’s Park, London; Villa Borghese, Rome
The Queen Mary’s Rose Garden in Regent’s Park, London — the largest public rose garden in England, with some 12,000 roses of around 85 cultivars in the inner circle garden — has a rose pergola of considerable quality, its iron framework carrying an extensive planting of climbing and rambling roses that reaches its peak in mid-June with a display of accumulated colour and fragrance that constitutes one of the finest free public rose experiences in the world. The combination of the Inner Circle’s enclosure — providing the shelter and warmth that climbing roses require for their best performance — with the mixed planting of climbers, ramblers, and bush roses in the surrounding beds creates a rose experience of exceptional density and variety.
The Bagatelle rose garden’s pergola, which carries primarily large-flowered climbing roses of the hybrid tea persuasion, is maintained to a standard that reflects its origin as a competitive rose trial garden: every plant is in excellent health, every tie has been attended to, the whole structure demonstrating the formal French approach to rose training at its most precise and most impressive. In June, when the main-season climbers are in their first flush, the Bagatelle pergola is one of the most beautiful rose structures in Europe.
The Species Rose: Form at Its Most Natural
The species roses — the wild ancestors and near-relatives of all cultivated roses — are the most underrepresented group in popular rose culture and among the most rewarding for the serious gardener who discovers them. They are, in almost every case, once-flowering; many produce fruits (hips) of great ornamental value in autumn and winter; and they bring to the garden a quality of natural presence — a wildness, a scale, an informality — that no bred cultivar quite replicates.
Rosa moyesii and its forms, introduced from western China by E.H. Wilson in 1903, is the species rose that has had the greatest impact on garden design internationally, and with good reason: its blood-crimson flowers — single, five-petalled, borne on long arching branches of considerable vigour in June — are among the most vivid and most architecturally striking in the genus, and the flask-shaped hips that follow in August and September — deep orange-red, sometimes five centimetres long, borne in clusters that weigh down the branches — are among the finest autumn ornaments available in any shrub. ‘Geranium’, a hybrid of R. moyesii selected at Wisley in 1938, is the form most widely available and most useful in the garden: its flowers are a slightly brighter, more orange-toned crimson than the species, its hips equally fine, and its habit slightly more compact.
Rosa glauca (formerly R. rubrifolia) is the species rose grown primarily for its foliage rather than its flowers, and it is one of the most valuable of all garden plants for exactly that quality. The leaves — blue-grey with a distinctive purple-pink flush, particularly intense on the young growth and on stems grown in full sun — are available from the moment they emerge in spring until they fall in autumn, a period of seven months during which they provide one of the finest foliage combinations with purple, pink, and crimson flowering plants available in the temperate garden. The flowers — small, single, clear pink with a white eye, produced in clusters in June — are modest but charming, and the small, dark red hips that follow add a further season of interest. It is a rose of extraordinary usefulness and great understated beauty, and the serious gardener who has not yet grown it is missing one of the genus’s most distinguished members.
The Destination for Species Roses: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey, England
The species rose collection at Kew — held partly in the dedicated rose garden adjacent to the Pagoda and partly distributed through the arboretum and landscape plantings — is the most scientifically important rose collection in Britain and one of the most horticulturally instructive. Seeing the wild ancestors of the cultivated roses — Rosa canina, R. arvensis, R. pimpinellifolia, R. moyesii, R. glauca, R. filipes, R. brunonii and their relatives — in the context of a botanical collection that documents their geographic origins and taxonomic relationships gives the gardener a perspective on the cultivated rose that no amount of time spent in commercial rose gardens provides. It is the experience of understanding the rose from its roots outward, rather than from its cultivated surface inward, and it changes permanently how you see the bred forms.
Part Four: Season — The Rose’s Year-Round Calendar
Understanding the Rose’s Seasons
The rose is, more than any other major flowering plant, a seasonal plant — not in the sense of flowering for a brief period and then disappearing (though some do), but in the sense that its relationship with time is complex, various, and endlessly interesting to those who pay attention to it. The rose garden in June is the most celebrated and the most visited expression of this seasonal complexity, but the rose garden in October, in February, in the grey half-light of a November afternoon, has its own quality and its own distinct pleasures, and the gardener who understands the rose’s full seasonal range has access to pleasures that the June-only visitor will never know.
Winter: The Framework Revealed
The rose in winter is an undervalued garden subject, and this is partly the fault of garden writers who have focused so exclusively on the flowering season that they have neglected the considerable interest of the dormant plant. The best winter rose gardens are those in which the framework of the planting — the trained stems of climbers on their wires or pergola, the pruned framework of old shrub roses, the arching canes of species roses heavy with coloured hips — is visible and interesting independent of any flower.
The hips of the rose family constitute one of the finest groups of autumn and winter ornaments available in any genus, and their range — from the small, clustering, bright orange-red fruits of Rosa multiflora and Rosa polyantha through the large, single, sealing-wax-red hips of Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’ to the elongated, bristly maroon fruits of Rosa roxburghii, the extraordinary black hips of Rosa pimpinellifolia, and the dark, plum-like fruits of Rosa glauca — is as wide and as various as the flowering forms that precede them.
The Destination for Winter Roses: Herstmonceux Castle Rose Garden, East Sussex, England
The rose garden at Herstmonceux Castle — a moated medieval castle in East Sussex whose grounds include a formal rose garden of considerable quality — is an undervisited destination that rewards the winter visit with a combination of architectural beauty and rose-hip interest that few other rose gardens approach. The castle’s moat, its reflected towers, and the surrounding rose plantings create in December a composition of considerable atmospheric power: the bare stems of climbing roses on the castle walls, the coloured hips of the surrounding shrub roses, and the reflections in the still moat water combining into a winter garden picture of quiet, concentrated beauty.
Spring: The Anticipation and the Early Species
The rose garden in spring — from the first emergence of the new growth in March through the swelling buds of late May — is a period of anticipation and preparation that the experienced rosarian finds as rewarding in its own way as the June flowering season. The emergence of rose foliage — the unfurling of the new leaves, often red-bronze or copper-tinted in the young growth, the colour of the expanding stipules, the first tentative shoots from the base of a pruned shrub — provides daily interest through March and April, and the gardener who has learned to read the health and vigour of a rose from the quality of its spring growth is already at an advantage.
The spring-flowering species roses begin their season in April with Rosa banksiae — the Banksian rose, whose small, pompon-like flowers of white or pale yellow are produced in April and early May on thornless, vigorous canes in such extraordinary profusion that a mature plant in full flower is quite unlike any other rose in the garden. It requires a warm, sheltered wall in British climates — it is tender at its growth tips in hard winters — but given that shelter it will grow to fifteen metres or more and flower with a generosity that makes it one of the great wall plants in horticulture. The yellow form, ‘Lutea’, is the most widely grown; the white ‘Albo Plena’ is, to some eyes, more beautiful — its small, double, pure white flowers carrying a fragrance of violet that the yellow form lacks.
June: The Peak
June is the month for which the rose garden was made, and the serious rosarian organises the entire year around it. The coincidence in early to mid-June of the once-flowering old roses — the gallicas, damasks, albas, centifolias, mosses — with the first flush of the repeat-flowering English roses, hybrid musks, and modern shrub roses produces, for approximately three weeks, a concentration of rose beauty that is unmatched at any other point in the calendar and that every other garden tradition, in every other season, can only aspire to approach.
The Destination for June Roses: Roseraie du Val-de-Marne, L’Haÿ-les-Roses, France; Mottisfont Abbey, Hampshire; Sangerhausen Rosarium, Germany
These three have already been discussed in the fragrance section, and they represent between them the finest June rose experiences available in Europe. The sequencing of a visit to all three — L’Haÿ in the first week of June when the gallicas and damasks are at their peak; Mottisfont in the second week when the collection reaches its broadest bloom; Sangerhausen at any point in June for the historical depth of its hybrid perpetual and species collections — constitutes a rose itinerary of the greatest possible horticultural education and pleasure.
July to October: The Repeat-Flowering Season
The repeat-flowering roses — the hybrid teas, floribundas, David Austin English roses, hybrid musks, and the China and tea roses from which the repeat-flowering quality derives — provide the rose garden’s second and subsequent flushes of bloom from July through October, and the quality of these later flushes is often underestimated by visitors who experience the rose garden only in June.
The October rose — particularly the old China roses, which tend to flower most freely in the cooler temperatures of early autumn, and the later-flushing Austin roses such as ‘Darcey Bussell’ and ‘Olivia Rose Austin’ — has a quality of colour that the June rose never quite achieves: the light is lower, warmer, more horizontal, and it illuminates the deep pinks and crimsons of the autumn flush in a way that the higher, bluer light of June does not. A well-grown ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ in its October flush, its flowers a deeper, richer pink than the June blooms, in the amber light of a still October afternoon, is one of those garden images that stays with you.
The Destination for Autumn Roses: La Roseraie de Provins, Seine-et-Marne, France
Provins — the medieval walled town in the Seine-et-Marne department, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the great medieval rose-growing centres of France — maintains a rose garden of considerable historical importance, its collection focused on the gallica roses and their historical relatives that were cultivated in Provins from the twelfth century onward for the production of medicinal rose products. The autumn visit — when the hips of the once-flowering gallicas are turning red against the golden leaves, and the repeat-flowering roses in the adjacent beds are in their final flush — combines the pleasures of the rose garden’s autumn display with the extraordinary historical atmosphere of the medieval town, its ramparts, its towers, and its market squares providing a setting that puts the long cultural history of the rose in its most immediate and most movingly concrete context.
The Rose’s Demand
A guide to the world’s rose gardens must end, as every serious engagement with the rose ends, with an acknowledgment of what the rose asks in return for what it gives. And what it asks is considerable: attention, time, knowledge, and the willingness to accept that the greatest pleasures are earned rather than simply encountered.
The rose does not reveal itself to the casual visitor. Its full depth — the extraordinary range of its fragrance types, the complexity of its colour variations within a single bloom, the architectural perfection of its finest forms, the seasonal richness of its full year — is available only to those who return repeatedly, who learn the vocabulary of cultivar names and class distinctions, who understand why the difference between a gallica and a damask matters and why ‘Tuscany Superb’ and ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’ are not the same crimson.
This knowledge is not difficult to acquire, and it transforms the experience of every rose garden visited thereafter. The transition from seeing a mass of pink flowers to seeing a specific cultivar with a specific fragrance and a specific history — from passive appreciation to active, informed engagement — is one of the most rewarding transitions available in any area of horticultural study. It is the difference between hearing a great symphony and simply enjoying some pleasant sound.
The rose gardens of the world are waiting. They are maintained by people who have dedicated professional lives to understanding the genus in its full complexity, and they are planted with material that represents four thousand years of human engagement with what is, by any measure, the most culturally significant plant on earth. To visit them with genuine curiosity and genuine preparation is to receive what they were made to give.
Go in June if you can. Go early in the morning, before the dew is off the petals. Bring a notebook. Stay longer than you planned.
The rose will do the rest.