Choosing My Boscobel Rose

Mentioning my Boscobel rose in my previous post without introducing the rose itself seems unfair, so here is something about it. My attitude towards roses is "so many roses, so little space", so I choose carefully and any tip and advice I had seen in the blogs, forums, etc was valuable piece of information for me when making the choices. Thus here are my two cents on these choices - Austin roses and Boscobel rose.

Firstly never miss a chance to get an Austin rose. 

The Austin roses were such a happy find for me when I noticed them on some pictures in the web. These romantic blooms, sheer colours and the way they look absolutely fantastic in mixed gardens/borders.... I knew, I will some day have some English roses. So I soon got the catalogue and I actually bought some. They are beautiful, fragrant and yellow! Well, mostly. Three of the best things about roses in my opinion. Until this spring when I bought two new rose plants and pink is officially one of the best things about roses here now.

Boscobel is a better choice than you might think

 

Choosing Boscobel rose was actually partly breeder's choice - a site filtering tool result for most fragrant David Austin rose, suitable for pots. I then chose the colour among the ones the site offered. Boscobel was such an easy choice - beautiful cup, two-toned petals, lovely colour and strong fragrance!
However this was just the beginning of all the good things this rose revealed.

I had the chance to choose my plant too and it was so beautiful when I brought it home.

I was not aware the rose had tiny buds on it but it did.

Few days later buds were big enough to see them and quickly grew into rose flowers /I had moved the plant by this time and the only picture I have of this stage is not a really beautiful one but you can see the buds colour/,

then opened

into beautiful coral flowers /that actually seemed quite a different colour than expected and a beautiful one too!/ with shallow centres

and lots of petals.

Than the blooms grew too...

The bloom transformation was a little magic to me. As you can see the colour was a bit different than the catalogue colours /same as the picture attached to the pot/. I knew from the web pictures it is probably darker in the catalogue than in real life. But I did not know blooms do change colours and start as a small coral colour bloom to grow into bigger pink blooms with golden petals. They also had so many petals... The shallow cup actually grew in depth as the bloom expanded and got darker. It also hold a perfect circle outer edge it was s peasant surprise too - the blooms looked like origami roses at later stage, as seen on the picture above.

The first blooming was not fragrant actually. I hope the second one will be.

I had no time/pot/soil to re-pot the rose until the blooms were gone. Sadly most of the leaves were gone too at this stage.

I bought it in 2l container. The UK site sells them in 6l ones.
It had 4 canes and maybe two buds on each, had been grown in a partly shaded greenhouse and hopefully newly formed buds on a sunny location and in bigger pot /more water and food/ will be loaded with fragrance.

What I think they should have mentioned is the fact the buds have beautiful little leaves on them. They look like ears! It was a lovely surprise and, for me, a real advantage of this rose - one more reason to be happy to have it.

I wish I had a better picture of the buds. The one on the left is the bigger one and the on the right the smallest. They all have the same beautiful ears like the middle one. And yes, I have to paint this wall! Maybe I will by the time this second bloom buds open.

I am now making a list for the next ones instead and deeper colour will be next addition, I think.