This rose proved to be a struggle to grow. It was a demanding little plant that had a hard time growing. It also did not produce many blooms, and more than once put out oddly colored blooms (some being half pink and half yellow, others being pink with large splashes of yellow vs. the blended color it is). However, I understand the color variation is fairly common with roses that are Sports. On the flip side, IF we managed to get the plant to bloom...AND the weather was right...AND the bloom wasn't an odd color...the results were fairly stunning. From my experience, I would skip Chicago Peace and grow a more vigorous, newer variety of similar color.

In the remake of Beauty and Beast, the heroine Belle exclaims to the Beast: 'A lifetime sentence...just for a single rose!' . She said this because her father was thrown in jail for life for stealing a bloom from the haunted garden. But immediately I thought of this rose, Dolly Parton. As long you own it, for its lifetime, plan on being sentenced to spraying and coddling it. It will will reward you with these magnificent blooms...huge, fully petaled with elegant and complex recurve, prissy high centers, sumptuous fragrance, long lasting, in a incredibly saturated scarlet orange. But while bloom has absolutely every desirable quality in spades, the underlying plant has none. The plant itself will be a thorny vision of Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree, a weak sapling making a futile effort to carry these enormous gaudy ornaments. It will require every sort of life support you can muster...Insecticide, fungicides on rotation, rich soil, amendments (alfalfa and fish emulsion please!), perhaps some support stakes to prevent collapse, warmth (does Amazon carry a rose heater?) , moist air (humidifier?).. for it to struggle along. It has the unique ability to get blackspot and mildew with equal ease. So keep up the intensive care regimen, in my mind this rose is worth it!

Well, blink and it'll be gone. Happens so often with roses and looks like I just realized Scarlet Knight was but sand through my hourglass. Had it for YEARS, all the 80's and into the 90's in my personal garden and until 2011 Columbus Park of Roses had a huge, healthy bed of this. Now all gone. It is a GREAT rose, and I admit: I don't like red roses! AARS 1968, released perfectly timed as those before it all had heavy scent and that red-maroon that tended to "blue" and those reds after it tended to have no scent but also a clearer, purer color that didn't "blue." Scarlet Knight doesn't "blue," it doesn't have any scent, the color is rich and deep, the blooms a BIG, the plant has gorgeous dark, glossy foliage. The blooms are big enough that this one could easily have been assigned Hybrid Tea as a class, it clusters a bit but so many HT's from its day do as well. Reds are not my favorites----they tend to lack personality to me----and this one I suppose is no different. Not a stand-out. But REALLY GOOD. I feel bad inasmuchas I always liked it, took it for granted it seems, and now although still available, only marginally so...............planted with its co-AARS from 1968, Europeana, the bed could be a stunning litany in deep red and big, glossy dark leaves..............