Many, many types of roses

Rosaceae is the third-largest plant family in all of botany.

This family includes many ornamental landscape plants, fruits, and berries, including apples, cherries, raspberries, and even pyracantha. Roses are members of the plant genus Rosa. Within that genus, roses are grouped into classifications based on the characteristics that each particular plant displays.

We’ll focus on the great 8 classes found in modern gardens in the US and Europe. Your choice of rose depends on how you plan to use it and on your personal preferences. Climbers require more work than miniatures.

Some rose gardeners grow only one or two types of roses, and others grow many types. Try growing 3 in each class and see which rose types you prefer.

8 classes of modern garden roses

Hybrid Teas

Hybrid tea roses are a great choice if you like large flowers with a pleasant rose form and if you like to make rose arrangements, as I do, or have cut flowers in the house.

They bear large flowers that commonly grow one to a long stem and bloom continually throughout the growing season. The bush can grow quite tall, with an upright growth habit that helps them stand out from other roses in a mass planted municipal garden.

Tea roses bring delicate beauty to yards thanks to their high, urn-shaped blossoms and graceful stems. The bushes are usually budded onto vigorous root stocks, and are generally disease resistant and hardy in mild climates. They don’t do well in winter, though, so give them extra care and double mulch during cold months.

Grandifloras

These are upright plants with flowers like hybrid teas that often grow in clusters, but the stems on each flower within a cluster are long enough for cutting.

Grandifloras normally grow to between 3 and 6 feet tall. They’re almost always budded and are a good choice if you like lots of blooms for color in the garden and stems for cutting, all on the same plant. I use them a lot in municipal gardens for their stature. Miscreants are usually intimidated by the thorns near their faces.

I like grandiflora roses because they are the best mix of hybrid tea and floribunda. They produce the same elegantly shaped blooms as hybrid teas, but in long-stemmed clusters that bloom well, like floribundas. They they can reach 7 feet, hardy, and disease-resistant.  Even though they are tall, they are thick-caned enough to survive urban winds & pesky visitors.

I like grandiflora roses because they are the best mix of hybrid tea and floribunda. They produce the same elegantly shaped blooms as hybrid teas, but in long-stemmed clusters that bloom well, like floribundas. They they can reach 7 feet, hardy, and disease-resistant.  Even though they are tall, they are thick-caned enough to survive urban winds and pesky visitors.

Floribundas

Choose floribundas if you need fairly low-growing plants that produce great numbers of colorful flowers. The bush is usually quite compact and blooms continually throughout the growing season.

Most floribundas are budded, but commercial growers are beginning to grow them on their own roots. These plants have flowers that are smaller than hybrid teas and they grow in clusters on short stems. They combine hardiness, free flowering, and showy, usually fragrant blooms. Also, the foliage on floribunda roses tends to shrug off disease, making for a low-maintenance plant that delivers continuous bloom cycles. 

Polyantha, a forerunner of our modern Floribunda, can be quite large and covered with small flowers. Their usual habit is compact, hardy, and generous-blooming. The variety you see most often is ‘The Fairy’ — a wonderful variety, covered with small pink flowers on a plant that can spread to several feet in height and width.

English Roses

English Roses have a pleasant fragrance and can bloom many times. They are a hybrid between modern roses and Old Garden Roses. and have exploded on the market over the last 30 years. They have a wide variety of petal styles, but most are hardy, low maintenance, and disease resistant – plus they make great cut flowers.

An English hybribizer named David Austin dedicated almost 60 years of his life just to develop the modern version of this rose. His emphasis was on breeding roses with the character and fragrance of old garden roses such as gallicas,  damasks,  and  alba roses but with the repeat-flowering ability and wide colour range of modern roses such as hybrid teas and floribundas.

Though Austin’s roses are not officially recognised as a separate class of roses by the Royal National Rose Society or the American Rose Society, they are nonetheless commonly referred to by rosarians, at nurseries, and in horticultural literature as ‘English Roses’.

In his later years, Austin separated his roses into four groups as a guide for further development:

• -the Old Rose Hybrids, roses with the appearance of the Old Roses but recurrent, healthy and with a wide range of colors.

• -the Leander Group, often with Rosa wichurana in their breeding, with larger bushes and arching growth tending to make them pillars or low climbing roses.

• -the English Musk Roses, based on ‘Iceberg’ and the Noisette roses, with pale green, slender and airy growth. The musk rose scent is missing from most, though other scents are present in many.

• -the English Alba Hybrids, with tall, rather blue-leaved bushes like the old Alba roses.^[4]

Perhaps in the coming years, we will see more of his roses from these groups come into commerce and be available to the home gardener. It’s an impressive legacy.

Miniatures

Most mini varieties bloom profusely throughout the growing season and are a great choice for lots of color in a small space. Extremely popular small plants, miniatures are usually between 6 and 36 inches in height, with proportioned leaves and flowers. They customarily grow on their own roots, and aren’t budded, which makes them hardier in shadier beds and in colder climates.

These little guys are perfect for small gardens, and adapt well to flowerbed edging and low hedges with perfectly shaped tiny blooms on clean, healthy plants that generally stay around 2 feet tall. In shows they have their own classes and the quantity of entries reflect the increased interest in this class.

Recently, the American Rose Society (ARS) classified a group of roses thought to be too large to be miniatures and too small to be floribundas as Minifloras. The name hasn’t been completely accepted by all parts of the nursery industry, so these varieties are often grouped & marked in nurseries as miniatures.

Climbers

Most climbing roses are mutations or variations on bush roses, and they develop either large, single flowers or clustered blooms on a long pliable stem. Loose anchoring to a support will encourage young plants to climb.

Flowers bloom along the whole length of the cane, especially if the cane is tied horizontally, such as along a fence or spread out in an espalier on a wall. Some traditional climbers bloom only once in the spring, but many of the modern climbers produce flowers throughout the growing season.

These plants don’t really climb like clematis or other true vines that wrap around or attach themselves to supports. They do, however, produce really long canes that need to be anchored to a fence, trellis, gazebo, obelisk, or other support. Otherwise, the plants sprawl on the ground.

A variation called ramblers are climbers that are characterized by sprawling canes which can be trained to cover wide areas like walls. Though their leaves can have a susceptibility to mildew, ramblers can easily overtake a structure and even climb walls and shed roofs. 

Perfect bird nesting sites

A climbing rose in your garden, which comes into leaf early, becomes the target for early nesting birds, while other cultivars blooming later will provide a nesting site for the small migratory birds which do not arrive until later in the Spring.

Sometimes, while sitting alone, you will find it gives you an endless source of interest, and it may be the wildlife’s best hope in a dense, loud urban setting.

Shrubs

Shrub roses are greatly under-used. They are derived in some cases from native roses that are free of disease and insect problems, so they are hardy and require little special care. If you want to fill a large space with color, the shrub category offers a great many choices.

Shrub roses take the most durable traits from most of the many rose species. They combine them with repeated blooming and diverse flower forms, colors and fragrances, becoming a great addition – often with little to no maintenance. Winner!

Because most are easy and great for landscaping, shrubs have become very popular in recent years. They’re generally large plants, and most, particularly modern shrubs, bloom profusely throughout the season.

Hearty shrub roses are often called “Landscape Roses” in the nurseries. They must be hardy, repeat-flowering, pest and disease-resistant with little to no care to qualify as a “landscape rose.”

Most landscape roses provide good cover for those birds which start to nest later in the year, and in autumn they should provide a good crop of hips.

Not only will the blooms add a very good splash of color from summer to autumn, but most of the roses will attract hummingbirds and bees in search of nectar – and help fill the garden with rose scent.

A new variation of the shrub is the ground cover rose. This class came about thanks to the advent of shrub roses. Low-growing ground cover roses are perfect for mass planting at the sidewalk border or under a tree; line a casual path, or mix in with annuals, perennials and shrubs.

Another variant is the ‘Knock Out’ rose. These sell by the millions and are available for us in the big box stores & in local nurseries in the US. Knock Outs are incredibly reliable, hardy, disease resistant and a great choice for first-time rose gardeners. They work well in mass plantings for color.

Include shrub roses on a border with spring flowering plants such as lilac and forsythia. Ideal for an informal flowering hedge or privacy screen. Some varieties add fall and winter interest with their bright red fruits.

Old Garden Roses

Often referred to as Antique roses, these roses were discovered or hybridized before 1867.

The classification “old garden roses” is made up of many subclasses of roses, including alba, gallica, bourbon, China, damask, and the species roses.

Many bloom only once during the growing season, but some do bloom more profusely. Typically, the pruning of OGRs is delayed as long as possible into the season, since part of their attraction is their informal appearance.

Old Garden Roses roses are the result of cross breeding of 2 roses & then cloning by stem cuttings to get more plants year after year. Two of the hallmarks of the Old Garden Rose is its distinctive fragrance, another is its intricate shape. OGR aficionados enjoy the history and study of these lovely and often fragrant plants.

Here are 5 OGR sub-classes for home gardens

Alba Rose

Alba is one of the original types of old garden roses. The general public often refers to these as just ‘ordinary white roses.’

Gallica roses

Like the Albas, Gallicas were among the first types of roses that were cultivated in the ancient world – again spread by the Romans. Consequently the modern Gallica is the result of a cross of its own kind but from 2 different locations: southern and central Europe.

Damask roses

Damask is known as a type of hybrid rose, and its origins are from Persia’s fertile crescent. It is known and used by industrial specialists for its distinctive fragrance & taste.

Centifolia Roses

Centifolia Roses are the result of breeding done in the 17th and 19th centuries, mostly in France. They are sometimes called a Provence Rose, and the breeders now are centered in the Netherlands.

Bourbon Roses

The Bourbon rose originated on the French Île Bourbon, now called Réunion Island off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.

These were first known in France around 1823 and are believed to be the result of a cross between rose varieties frequently used as hedging materials on the island.

From its unusual origins, there are some unusual traits:

For more on growing gorgeous roses, read Making a Rose Garden.

Sources: David Austin Roses, Weeks Roses, ARS, Tacoma Rose Society, Wikipedia.