I love roses. I have always loved roses. Now that we have a house in the sun, I can actually grow roses – though the most beautiful and prolific of our roses live on the north side of the house where they are unprotectedly exposed to freezing winds from the north in the winter, very little sun in the spring and fall, but still baking in the afternoon sun in the height of the summer, hardly ideal growing conditions.

For me personally, a rose must have a scent. A rose without a scent is like a very beautiful woman without a soul.

Heritage rose. The official description reads:

Attractive, medium-sized blooms, produced in small sprays. Their colour is a very soft, clear pink at the centre, while the outer petals are almost white. There is a beautiful fragrance, with overtones of fruit, honey and carnation on a myrrh background. ‘Heritage’ is a shapely, well-rounded shrub with strong, bushy growth and typical, pointed, greyish-green Hybrid Musk Rose foliage. It is almost thornless. To encourage repeat flowering, dead head the spent blooms. If you choose not to dead head, a very good crop of hips will be produced later in the season.

5 ft. x 4 ft. (7 ft. as climber)

Ours has been growing for about three years now and has easily reached 6 feet already, with most of the growth over the last year. It is now so tall that I am thinking of a way to train it to a trellis but it grows in front of a window so I want to be careful not to block the view (by a trellis).

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Gertrude Jekyll. From the David Austin Roses website:

The flowers of this rose start as perfect little scrolled buds and soon open into the most beautiful, large, rosette-shaped flowers of rich glowing pink. The growth is upright and vigorous and in every way reliable. The most outstanding characteristic of this lovely rose is its beautiful and perfectly-balanced Old Rose scent. This is often described as being the quintessential old rose fragrance. The foliage and growth are similar to that of a Portland Rose, with the typical Portland widely-spaced leaflets. It forms a medium sized shrub which is robust and free flowering. Gertrude Jekyll was a famous garden designer, who has had a profound effect on the style of English gardens of the present day.

4.5 x 3.5 ft or 6-8 ft as a climber.

Yes, the scent is out of this world but what they don’t mention are the thorns. I have never seen such vicious thorns on any rose. When we added the new retaining wall in the backyard, with new flower beds, Mark and I transplanted this rose to the corner. Vigorous growth? Holy Cow, they aren’t kidding. We dug and dug and dug and still cut off too many roots. We’ll see if it survived and comes back in the spring.