Making Scents

As well as looking good, roses can reward the gardener with a variety of delightful perfumes, says Brian Pike oses have been cultivated for well over two thousand years, but long before that time wild roses were already being used to make rosewater, scented oils and other fragrances.

Nowadays, of course, we can benefit from the results of two millennia of selective breeding aimed at fine-tuning both the appearance and the smell of these much-loved flowers.

Whilst many unscented roses make excellent garden plants, it’s tempting to opt for the best of both worlds by planting varieties that combine good looks with beguiling perfume.

The Famous Five

Smells are notoriously difficult to describe or categorise, but received wisdom has it that there are five main rose fragrances: old rose, tea, myrrh, fruit and musk.

Old rose, also known as damask, is the fragrance most of us would recognise as a ‘traditional’ rose smell – the one that’s familiar from rosewater and other rose-scented products. Old rose fragrances are usually only found in pink or red roses.

Tea fragrances, as the name suggests, are reminiscent of the smell of fresh tea leaves –loose-leaf tea rather than the minced-up stuff in teabags – and often have violet or earthy notes. Tea fragrances are frequently found in yellow or apricot English roses.

Myrrh fragrances are rich and aromatic, and are sometimes compared to the scents of liquorice or star anise. They are mostly found in English roses.

Fruit fragrances – a category covering a range of different odours including citrus, berry and apple –are also associated with English roses.

Musk fragrances are sweet, spicy and strongly reminiscent of cloves. Unlike other fragrance types, musk scents are produced by the rose’s stamens rather than its petals. Musk fragrances are characteristic of rambling roses.

Best Smellers

So let’s run through some notable scented roses, starting with a thumpingly powerful example of old rose fragrance: ‘Gertrude Jekyll’. This is a metrehigh English shrub rose with large, bright pink flowers; it was bred by David Austin and named in honour of the famous garden designer.

Rosa gallica ‘Versicolor’, often known as ‘Rosa Mundi’, is another compact shrub rose of the old rose type, and its showy flowers are fuchsia pink striped with white. ‘Charles de Mills’ is a larger shrub rose – half as tall again as ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ – that also delivers a powerful old rose fragrance. Quite apart from its scent it’s well worth growing for its opulent magenta blooms.

If you’re looking for a tea-scented rose, ‘Lady of Shalott’, another English shrub rose from David Austin, certainly fits the brief, especially if you enjoy the colours of a fiery sunset. Its orange blooms have salmon pink outer petals with golden yellow undersides. Another tea-scented shrub rose – one whose fragrance also carries a hint of lemon – is ‘Charles Darwin’, which has large, golden yellow blooms.

Good examples of myrrh-scented roses are ‘Wollerton Old Hall’, ‘Shropshire Lass’ and ‘Strawberry Hill’, all of which are climbers. The first has pale apricot flowers; the second is white and the third has large, mid-pink blooms.

Roses that offer fruity fragrances include creamywhite climbing rose ‘Mme Alfred Carrière’, yellow shrub rose ‘The Poet’s Wife’, and the vigorous crimson rambler ‘Alexandre Girault’.

An even more vigorous rambler, the creamy ‘Rambling Rector’ is renowned for its strong musky scent, as is the equally hyperactive, pink-flowered ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’.

For a musky fragrance in a less triffid-like plant, the delicate pink ‘Blush Noisette’ is an excellent choice. I grow this tied in to a wooden obelisk and it’s a remarkably profuse repeat-flowerer.

Sniff It And See

As might be expected with any attempt to classify something as hard to describe as smell, not all roses fit easily into one or other of the five fragrance categories.

‘The Generous Gardener’, for example, is a gorgeous pale pink climber whose heady scent combines old rose, myrrh and musk. And ‘Arthur Bell’ is a perky, large-flowered, bright yellow floribunda rose whose robust fragrance is hard to describe as anything other than ‘sweet’.

In the final analysis we all respond to smells in slightly different ways. Reading descriptions can only take you so far, and the best way to find out what you like is to visit gardens, flower shows and nurseries and have a good sniff!

If you plan to go prospecting for scented roses, the morning is the best time to do it – or failing that, a warm but overcast afternoon. A certain amount of heat will accentuate the fragrance, but when roses bake in strong sunshine the volatile oils that give them their scent will evaporate, causing the strength of the odour to diminish.

Once you’ve decided on your scented roses, it’s worth thinking carefully about where to plant them. Ideally they should be outside your door, next to a garden seat or beside a favourite pathway – somewhere easily accessible that allows you to revel in those delicious odours as easily and as often as possible.

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