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• Boddhisatwa
• VIRsplash

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Pink blend Shrub.
Registration name: VIRsplash
Exhibition name: Magic East ™

Bred by M.S. Viraraghavan (India, before 1995).
Introduced in Canada by Hortico Inc. in 1995 as 'Magic East'.

Hybrid Tea, Shrub.  

Pink, cream streaks, stripes, flecks, cream reverse.  Mild fragrance.  15 to 25 petals.  Average diameter 5".  Very large, double (17-25 petals), borne mostly solitary, cluster-flowered bloom form.  Blooms in flushes throughout the season.  

Medium, bushy.  Medium, matte, blue-green foliage.  

USDA zone 7b and warmer.  

With a quite a number of our roses, we have had to give two names. One for the Indian rose world, and the other for the Western. The Indian names will be understood, in their contexts, and will be easy to pronounce by rose growers in our country. But many would be difficult, tongue twisting abracadabra names for the Western rose lovers. Many of the roses have been in the Indian catalogues for many years before we decided to register them, at which point we had to think up English names.
Remember ‘Ahimsa’ and ‘Orient Silk’ written about above?
This variety, which is in the ‘hand-painted’ strain, has buds of white and pink, and the large flowers open to shades of pink and white with reddish markings. It is a very distinctive rose and it gave us unbelievable pleasure to name it in honor of India’s first rose breeder – Mr. B.S.Bhatcharji, of West Bengal State, whose writings have been a guiding light for Viru. In practically every lecture that Viru has given, all over the world, he will always refer to the signposts that Mr. Bhatcharji set up for breeders who want to create warm climate roses – roses for India and other similar climatic areas of the world.
The ‘B’ in Mr. Bhatcharji’s name stands for ‘Bodhisattwa’ and as this name also is a reference to the Buddha, we liked the idea of naming this different looking rose this way.

In Buddhism, a Bodhisattwa is a divine being, worthy of nirvana, who remains on the human plane to help men to salvation.
As the West has always associated the eastern world as esoteric and different we thought the name ‘Magic East’ for this rose, which,
as a true hand painted variety , has each bloom looking slightly different, would be a catchy name

Named after B. S. Bhattacharya, doyen of tropical rose breeding in India