‘MY BIGGEST SURPRISE’ SERIES | ROSE ‘MORNING MIST’ | DAVID AUSTIN 1996

HOW I CAME TO APPRECIATE THE SINGLE FLOWER ROSES?

INTRODUCTION | THE RIGHT ROSES

At The Right Roses, we support two important causes:

1. ‘The Best Rose Experience’.
2. ‘Together We Protect This Planet’.

The team at The Right Roses firmly believes that, with the support from all members, collectively we can make a big difference. Moreover, sharing your own experience and stories will be such an important way to enrich the resources for rose-lovers all over the world, including YOU.

This time, we would like to share with you a story from one of our dear friends in Instagram, a passionate gardener from the UK. She has a lovely garden with a great collection of roses, such as Desdemona, The Mill On The Floss, Summer Song, Tottering-By-Gently, etc. However, best of all is her lovely dogs. One of them, recently, just had a (or two) very nice pairs of shoes 😊.

Today, Tracey will talk about how she came to appreciate the single flower roses. It is such a fascinating story to us! We hope that her story can be a source of inspiration to many gardeners. We highly appreciate Tracey’s contribution.

We look forward to many other stories around the world. Please send your rose experience to RightRosesCom@gmail.com.

 ‘MY BIGGEST SURPRISE’ SERIES | MS. TRACEY

Country: UK

Hardiness Zone: 8b

Aspect: South facing

Number of Hours Direct Sunlight Summer: 6+

Number of Hours Direct Sunlight Winter: N/A

Spray or not: Not

Name of the Rose: Morning Mist (‘Ausfire’)

Breeder: David Austin 1996

I always used to ignore the single flowered roses, as they just weren’t what I thought of as a rose. I much preferred the full, many petalled varieties.

For many years, hybrid tea roses were my point of reference for what a rose should look like. My mother had grown them when I was a child, and I can still remember going with her to Woolworths and searching through the bags of bare root roses to find the ones she liked. Then in 1996, when I was planting up my first garden, I took advantage of an offer in the BBC Gardeners’ World magazine for four David Austin roses. These were A Shropshire Lad, Eglantyne, Gertrude Jekyll, and Geoff Hamilton. I saw those flowers, and I was hooked.

Fast forward to 2015, when we moved to the English county of Herefordshire. We live about 40 miles away from the David Austin Roses plant centre at Albrighton in Shropshire, and that summer we made our first visit there. Whilst wandering around the gardens I caught sight of the big, bushy Morning Mist rose, it was  absolutely laden with flowers, and breathtakingly beautiful with the blooms in many stages of development, showing off different shades of pink and coral. Now this was a surprise, a single flower rose was stopping me in my tracks, and all at once I could not believe that I had dismissed the single flower roses for all that time. 

I know that many of the multi-petalled roses that I adore are unsuitable for pollinating insects, and so I grow many other plants specifically with them in mind. Single flowered roses offer the best of both worlds, as they are ideal for attracting bees and other insects. I now have several single flower varieties in our garden, I have made a point of adding them. These days when I see bees visiting the roses, I think that is just about as perfect as it gets!

Photo credit: Tracey