• Peacock Throne’/ 'Rudolfs Indischer Traum™
• Seedling No 62/2007
• VIRpeacock

Bred by M.S. Viraraghavan (India, 2007).

Floribunda, Shrub.  

Dark purple.  Mild, spice fragrance.  12 to 15 petals.  Average diameter 3".  Small to medium, semi-double (9-16 petals), borne mostly solitary, cluster-flowered bloom form.  Blooms in flushes throughout the season.  

Bushy.  Medium, glossy, dark green foliage.  

Disease susceptibility: very disease resistant.  

Our friend Rudolf Bergmann lives in Lauterbach, Germany and has two beautiful rose gardens, one surrounding his house and the other, a little away, where he grows old heritage roses, many of rare vintage and some legendary ones not seen elsewhere. He is most knowledgeable about heritage roses, and has a penchant for correct rose identification, and helps many well known rose gardens in Europe correct their mis-identified roses by doing a lot of long and patient research.

Rudolf became interested in Viru’s hybridising goals and his use of rose species in his breeding work. Having travelled in south east Asia in his younger days he has an affinity for this region so he identified with Viru’s aim of breeding roses for warm climates. We had been in touch with him for some years and he thought it would be a good idea to disseminate Viru’s articles on his rose breeding aims to a wider audience. To this end he started Rose Biblio/Die Rosen Bibliothek Library of Roses/Bibliotheque des Roses, which has a collection of all of Viru’s articles, written mainly for the Indian Rose Annual, over the years from 1978 to 2023, but also articles for various Indian rose societies’ souvenirs, and other international rose journals. Having all these articles online in one place will hopefully make it easy for anyone interested in Viru’s thinking and his ideas on rose hybridisation. He followed this up by his http//roses.shoutwiki.com/wiki/KategorieViraraghavan which like HelpMeFind.com roses, lists all Viru’s roses and his Vir-coded seedlings.

Viru, and I , were always most grateful to Rudolf Bergman, for taking the trouble and effort to do this stupendous task. We never met him though we were constantly in correspondence. And Viru, in his inimitable manner, wanted to honour this long distance friend by naming a rose he had bred for him. We had been discussing about a possible seedling, but never finally decided on a particular seedling. And then, Viru was gone. I remembered his desire to name a rose for Rudolf and kept looking at our seedlings, some of which had been given code names. One was VIRPEACOCK, a seedling from 2007, which had Viru’s own ‘Twilight Secret’ (called ‘Rose Anil’in India) and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, that wonderful blue/purple rose bred by our friend Frank Cowlishaw of the U.K.Viru has used this seedling a great deal in his hybridising work. He called it’ Peacock Throne’ in his records, because he felt the rich vibrant purple range of colours it displayed had a touch of royalty, reminiscent of the splendid throne, made of gold, diamonds and many other precious stones of many colours, of the Mughal Emperors of India, commissioned to be built by Emperor Shah Jahan in the 17th century. Though the original is no longer in existence as it was looted by Nadir Shah of Iran in the 18th century, and finally disappeared, many replicas were made, but none having the grandeur and scale of the original.

Viru was always most fond of this seedling. In fact he had two seedlings from the same parentage, which he called Peacock Throne 1 and Peacock Throne 2 ( VirPeacock 1 and 2 in HelpMeFind.com/roses and in Rudolf’s shoutwiki/ KategorieViraraghavan link).

When I mentioned to Rudolf Viru’s desire to name a rose for him, Rudolf asked if Virpeacock could be chosen. Naturally I was delighted because it was one of Viru’s favourite seedlings. Since Viru had called this seedling Peacock Throne, I would like to have this name continued, but for Rudolf it is ‘Rudolf’s Indischer Traum' ( Rudolf’s Indian Dream) which I think is most appropriate.

Prickles: small size, thin, triangular,curving downward, brown colour