HELPMEFIND PLANTS COMMERCIAL NON-COMMERCIAL RESOURCES EVENTS PEOPLE RATINGS
|
|
|
"Florence Bowers' Pink Tea" rose Reviews & Comments
-
-
|
Thank you for the excellent photos Deborah.
What a beautiful rose it is!
(What I could imagine the bloom of Mme Lambard x the Banshee Rose we saw at Sacramento might look like!)
Definite climbing habit or careful training on your part?
|
REPLY
|
|
Sorry for this delayed reply! I am out doing winter clean-up/pruning now and yes, Billy, definitely a climbing habit: many extraordinarily long canes (including laterals) and the trend is up, up, up. If this rose could climb higher, it would. The main canes are 12 - 14' long beginning 3 years in the ground, planted as a 1-gallon band.
The prickles on the hips continued, also, up to mid-December, when a prolonged cold snap finally shut flower production down (just cut off some bunches of freeze-dried flowers and buds). So I do believe the prickles on the hips are a consistent, not transient, trait.
|
REPLY
|
-
-
|
Comment from gracin in Website Omissions: "Rose Listing Omission. Florence Bower's Pink tea."
Omission? No it is certainly listed and as you spelt it. A search using CONTAINS will easily find it. Perhaps you just wanted to share the provenance of the rose - and thanks. We have added that it came from Ruth Knopf. It is always better to comment on a rose, in that rose's page.
it is a most interesting rose with those prickly hips. Have you ever heard who Florence Bower is?
|
REPLY
|
-
-
|
Petals drop off cleanly after bloom.
|
REPLY
|
-
-
|
Thanks for your excellent photos Deborah! (And to Janelle for telling me about your rose.)
Would you be able to take a set, showing the same features, every few months or when you have the opportunity. It would be very good to have a photographic record of variations in form and colour over the seasons.
It's probably too early to tell, but does "Florence Bower's Pink Tea" seem like a rose that repeats regularly, or does it have an exuberant spring flush and occasional blooms after that?
Do many others grow this rose? In different climate zones? Photos and observations from other zones would help build up information about the extent of its variability.
I'm curious to know how much the colour varies.
Do you know whether the original plant still exists?
Glandular, bristly pedicels aren't uncommon in Teas but receptacles that are consistently this glandular are rare and if this is a stable trait in "Florence Bower's Pink Tea", it might help track down its original name - it'll certainly be a way to eliminate possibilities!
|
REPLY
|
|
Billy, I will be happy to take a set of photos over the seasons (each flush, at the least). Too soon to tell how prolific the flushes after the first will be, but I do have a feeling it's a repeater. Although there were few blooms overall last year, as it settled in, there was still a nice set in the fall. Vintage Gardens (from whom I got the plant) lists the rebloom as "good".
On your other questions, I don't believe many people grow this rose. From the GardenWeb antique roses forum I know that a few people, in California and Florida, at least, have obtained bands from Vintage in the past year (okay, there's zones 9 and 10...). I can ask (and keep asking) for info/observations on the GardenWeb forum. From a recent GardenWeb post we know, too, that Florence Bowers still lives in Lake Murray, South Carolina, but not whether or not the original plant still exists.
Thank you very much for the benefit of your experience about bristly pedicels/receptacles. Between very limited experience with teas in general and the limited sampling of teas in my own garden, it was impossible to know if this was an unusual character or not! Will be very interesting to record how consistent the character is -- and how bloom color varies through the seasons. (I remember the colors of the blooms were changeable last year, but not the details. The color difference in the two 1 April 2013 photos, presumably only due to sun exposure difference, is marked).
|
REPLY
|
|
Many thanks Debbie! Most Tea roses are quite variable - more so than many other classes of rose - and not just in bloom form and colour. Perfume can vary with conditions (there are some that smell like banana confectionary one day, citrus on another day, violets when the conditions are just right; pure and strong one day, non-existent the next.) Growth habit can vary a lot. A small bush in one zone may grow so large in another it might be thought to be a climbing sport. Generally not (climbing sport). Just a rose working very closely with and responding to its particular conditions. Some varieties vary in the glandularity of their pedicels and the prickliness of their stems. Some have prickles on the very new growth, but shed them after a very short time, so that a rose you thought of as prickly in spring may be quite thornless in autumn. Makes it tricky to attempt to describe a 'typical' example of a variety. Takes a long time to work out which features are relatively stable and which are not. And when you think you know a rose pretty well, they do things that you have never seen before. (Best to never say never with Tea roses. If you say "I have never seen a prickle on the stems of 'G. Nabonnand' ", for example, the next time you go out into the garden to pick a bunch, there will be a single prickle winking at you.)
There's no doubt that they are very sensitive to even slight variations in conditions - temperature, weather, soil and nutrients etc etc.
It's good to hear news of the lady this rose is named for. Do you know anyone who knows Ms Bowers and who might be able to gather more information about the original plant?
|
REPLY
|
|
|
