So you’ve found that extremely fragrant rose (perhaps a Damask) perfect for your Aromatherapy needs. Now you must consider if this rose is suited to your climate and soil conditions. While soil can always usually be amended or fully replaced to support your rose, your climate may mean doom if it is not compatible with your rose. OGR (Old Garden Roses also known as Antique and Heritage Roses) are usually not as fussy and troublesome as hybrid teas. The big draw to hybrid tea's centuries ago was their fragile nature and difficulty to grow. Since it was richer people with hired gardeners who predominately enjoyed such plants, this can explain the horror many have with these roses today, especially if you live in a colder zone. However, those of us growing in colder areas will many times have the wonderful gift of scent that the same rose, growing in a warmer area, will not have. Even though OGR’s may be hardy, they still may not react as well as they should if they are not in their perfect zone. Other times you may need to work harder to make them do their very best.
Many OGR’s are in themselves hybrids. With Hybrid Tea’s, they lost most of their scent do to the plant being bred to produce large flowers. They expend so much of their energy doing this, that they have very little left to produce essential oil. Essential oil is a trial for a plant to make, as it will usually wear off the petals in a short matter of time and thus needs to be pumped out of the pours again. That is why, sometimes you must give up florist perfect flowers and continuous bloom, for an essential oil producing machine like a Damask. As noted in the previous article in this series, China Roses had little to no scent. Since they repeat, they are in almost every Hybrid Tea’s lineage. Ruining their scent potential. Many are unaware of this because they have never smelled a non-Hybrid Tea rose. The fact that many OGR’s are hybrids in some way also has another problem and that is ability to take either the cold or heat. Variants can be on a rose by rose basis. You can not always rely on all Damask’s being able to take the cold wonderfully and so forth. For instance, according to Mr. Martin in his book 100 Old Roses for the American Garden, the Apothecary’s Rose, a Gallica of Medieval origins, does wonderfully in the cold but is horrid in very hot climates. Another Gallica, Belle de Crecy does wonderfully in both hot and cold climates.
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