Blush Noisette

class: Noisette Rose
breeding: Noisette, 1817
photographed by Daphne Filiberti in her garden

'Blush Noisette' has elegant trusses of delicately colored roses, and it is rarely out of flowers. The rose can be pruned hard into a shrub of about four or five feet tall, or it can be trained as a small climber (It's been planted for 4 years and is about 10 feet in my garden). 'Blush Noisette' has a striking display of rounded teardrop shaped buds, which come in large numbers. These buds would make lovely boxes of potpourri when dried. The petals are scented of a musky spice. I can almost picture Cupid in a Rubenesque painting scattering these petals over lovers from his childlike hands. The color of the buds is a lilac dusted pink. The flowers open into a cupped form and then turn to soft semi-double roses in large panicles. The foliage is a deep green and is healthy. The only down-side is that the rose can ball and not open in rain. Redoute painted the rose under the name of Rosa noisettiana. There is more on the rose's historical information in my Noisettes section. I have recently read that there are two versions of 'Blush Noisette' grown in the United States. This information came from an article written by Rev. Douglas T. Seidel in the August 1999 issue of The Quarterly Rose Letter of the Heritage Roses Group. The one I have originated in England. It is the rose that is sold by own-root nurseries in the States and by English and Danish sources. Robert Buist referred to the rose as "Lee, Monstrosa Coelestis, Grandiflora, Triomphe des Noisettes, and Carassana". It might still be circulated by those names. Reverend Douglas T. Seidel, wrote that he first encountered the rose in Calvert County, Maryland, in the mid-1970's, where a collection of Mrs. Keays' roses then survived. I do not have the other 'Blush Noisette' rose, which is still sold by Pickering. It was once sold by Roses of Yesterday and Today, and originated from an old collection in Georgia.