Old Garden Roses

Old Garden Roses. . , Gardeners have long bred roses for color and fragrance., Roses have grown in gardens for thousands of years. Gardeners have taken advantage of the natural variation among wild rose species to breed plants that exhibit unusual color, petal count, and rich fragrance. The oldest European garden roses are gallica, damask, alba, and moss. Planted here along the fence, their pink, red, or white flowers bloom once per year. On the outskirts of Paris, Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais grew many varieties of gallicas at her Château de la Malmaison, and commissioned botanical artis Pierre-Joseph Redouté to paint her favorite rose. Her garden featured the largest display of roses in early 19th-century France., Old garden roses from Asia have a wider range of flower colors, including yellow and orange, and many are repeat-flowering, producing uniquely fragrant flowers several times over many months. In the early 19th century, growers began to breed long-flowering and fragrant China roses with large-flowered European roses. Hybrid perpetuals with their large, fragrant, continually flowering blooms were the most popular. However, due to their susceptibility to disease, they were eventually replaced by varieties introduced during the latter half of the 19th century.