This is a great rose. It is nice and bushy, and I just like it so much more than a lot of modern grafted roses. Mind you, a hardy, own root hybrid tea is a very special thing. Only a few perform well for me, and interestingly enough, Blue Girl and Blue Moon do very well, as do several Hybrid Perpetual and Moss roses and other OGRs. Purple is my favorite color and coincidentally purple roses grow well for me. My aesthetic is very species oriented, and once again, species grow well for me. So it may be a chicken or the egg situation. Maybe they do well for me because I like them a lot so I take better care of them, or maybe they are better growers for me so I have adopted a soft spot for them. Both sides of that equation are probably true.

I'm hoping to get a cross of moschata x rugosa this year to send to someone, and to keep for myself. Probably the closest thing to that in existence is the gootendorst roses. It would be nice to get a direct species cross to capitalize on fragrance, hardiness, remontancy, and disease resistance. I can see a lot of potential there.

I would love to recreate the damask as rugosa x moschata x fedtschenkoana. It would normally have gallica instead of rugosa, but gallica is a once bloomer. With rugosa in the cross, all parents would be rebloomers and that would mean a nice steady reblooming fragrant damask type rose with improved cold tolerance. A lot of people would say I'm basically wasting my time making such primitive crosses, but a nice perfected species cross with a clean bloodline free of disease sources would be a good starting point to base a hybridizing program. Some of the nicest roses are very simple.