My Favorite Roses Are Not a Secret!
There are so many wonderful roses. How can anyone have one absolutely favorite rose? Well, I did, and it was not a secret because I like to share joy. My only favorite rose used to be the hybrid tea, Secret. I don’t love Secret any less, but I now have two favorite roses.
Why do I love these roses?
Borrowing a line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
1) You are absolutely beautiful.
2) You are strongly and irresistibly fragrant.
3) You make the garden so beautiful as you are so very generous and prolific with your abundant flushes of blooms.
4) You give me so many blooms to bring inside.
5) You are so hard-working and you repeat-bloom with record speed.
6) You age gracefully, and your blooms hold their beauty for a long time in the garden and in a vase.
7) You are disease resistant.
8) You have very few thorns, and you are generous with new basal breaks.
Secret is an exhibition quality hybrid tea that was bred by Daniel Tracy in 1992 and introduced by Star Roses in 1994. Its parentage is Pristine x Friendship. Its registration name was HILaroma. Secret has a stunning pink and cream bloom with 30-35 petals. Some blooms will have more pink, or more cream, and I believe that this is connected to the weather. I have been growing Secret for probably close to twenty years.
Secret usually blooms one bloom to a stem, but it also blooms in clusters. It has a strong fruity fragrance. The bush is 4 to 5 feet in height and about 3 feet wide. It is a vigorous and hardy rose. In my coastal garden it does get rust and sometimes a little blackspot. It never gets powdery mildew. It does seem to get some cane disease, and I have a theory (but no scientific back-up) that this might be due to its soft buttery canes and its few thorns. However, the cane dieback that I cut out has not been a problem to the overall health of the bush as Secret regularly puts out new basal growth.
Secret was an AARS Winner in 1994. It received the Portland Best Rose in 1998, and the Gamble Fragrance Award in 2002. In the American Rose Society’s Selecting Roses Handbook, Secret has an 8.0 rating.
Beverly In 2020 I planted Beverly, a Kordes hybrid tea rose with large, very full bright pink blooms that have a very strong fruity fragrance. Beverly has very good disease resistance and was the winner of the Best Hybrid Tea and Most Fragrant Rose awards at the 2013 Biltmore International Rose Trials. In the American Rose Society’s Selecting Roses Handbook, Beverly has a 7.8 rating. She is one of Kordes’ Eleganza® collection of roses. I purchased my Beverlyon Fortuniana rootstock, and she sent out 6-foot canes in her first year and immediately gave me an impressive number of blooms. Everything I have said about why I love Secret is true for Beverly. When she blooms, she literally covers itself, top to toe, in blooms and she blooms often.
I call my home office my rose parlor. There is always a vase with roses in my rose parlor and more often than not, the roses in the vase are either Secret or Beverly or both. They are my absolute favorite type of rose …the kind that are on a quest to please!
