Rosa Dearest Floribunda Rose

Dearest roses sporting clusters of exquisite flowers that appear in flushes throughout the season. As a floribunda rose it has everything. Each flower has thirty petals in a whorl of softly, interconnecting layers; not so tightly packed as the cabbage roses but with enough presence to look full and generous. The glossy dark leaves add to the effect and are toothed and ovate in form. Dearest also has a remarkably spicy and strong scent for a relatively modern rose of such beauty and grows in a neat and tidy way to give you a good shape that is easy to prune.

See our full range of Floribunda roses to buy online.

Gorgeous for summer and autumn

A great merit of the Dearest Rose is that it goes on and on flowering in waves throughout the summer and autumn so that you have continuous interest in your border through the shoulder season. This makes it ideal as a cutting flower or in the herbaceous border contrasted with the vertical splendour of lilies like Lilium regale or blending in with peonies like Paeonia 'Shirley Temple'. As with many roses, Dearest goes well with an underplanting of lavender like Hidcote or cotton lavender, Santolina chamaecyparissus. Its soft pink complements purples and silvers - those woolly leaved rabbit ears Stachys byzantina look enchanting - or plant it in groups of three or five for a floriferous display for months.

Features

• Height: 60-90 cm 
• Colour: salmon pink to pale pink
• Shape of flower: camellia like, round, double to semi double
• Size of flower: up to 8 cm
• Spread: 80 cm
• Scent: spicy and strong
• Flowering: May to October
• Group: Floribunda
• Foliage: Glossy, dark green

Factettes

Alexander Dickson of the eponymous rose breeders bred this rose in 1960 and named it in honour of his wife Maud, not because he was planning to make it the most expensive rose ever, ever.....

Floribunda means many flowered in Latin and was the result of crossing hybrid tea and polyantha roses so that you got the beauty and size of the hybrid tea with the promiscuity of the polyantha. The Dane, Dines Poulson, bred the first of the type in 1907.