Modern roses all too often do not have a fragrance. For an antique fragrance, much like rose water, small double ‘Petite de Hollande’ is a favorite in my garden. A new one is dark purplish-red ‘Night Owl’ with a hybrid tea fragrance— tea touched by pineapple and spice. When these roses are blooming, companions like white mock-orange varieties (Philadelphus ‘Belle Etoile’, for example) blossom as do clove-scented Dianthus. Then, the flowers on wands of lavender begin to open: Lavandula angustifolia, L. a. ‘Munstead’, L. ‘Hidcote Pink’).

 

When we meet a rose in a garden, today, if it has any scent at all, it smells mostly of fruit and tea. That’s a sketchy description of the scent of a hybrid tea rose. These roses were a sensation from the start when they were introduced in the 1800s. Unlike the once-blooming, old shrub roses that European and American gardeners knew, these roses rebloomed throughout the season. Prior to 1867, when the first hybrid tea rose, ‘La France’, was introduced, fruit and tea were not what people knew as the scent of a rose. If you have ever smelled rose water, you may have a better idea of what the old roses were like: It has a dusty, flowery, perfume smell that seems dry and sweet, intense and delicate at the same time. You can almost feel it in your nose. I grow an old rose in my garden. It is a little centifolia called ‘Petite de Hollande’. Centifolia roses contribute essential oils used in perfume.

There is a downside to having a notable fragrance. Flowers that fill the air with scent are actually decomposing, evaporating and allowing their molecules to drift off into the air for us to sample. But sniff a dozen cut long-stemmed roses, today, which have been bred to last nearly two weeks, and you won’t smell anything.

As plant hybridizers worked to develop longer-lasting cut roses, the recessive gene for fragrance was lost. Breeding for long stems also compromised scent. In the garden, too, scent is drifting away. Most recent attempts to produce disease-resistant, long-blooming bushes also sacrificed the recessive gene for fragrance. Humans undid in a century the perfume it took roses thousands of years to develop.

Maybe people today do not know what they are missing. American gardeners want healthy, low-maintenance, and long-flowering bushes. As long as they do, plants like the original Rosa ‘Knock-Out’ will dominate the market, even though it has no scent.

There are a few rose growers who are trying to get fragrance back while keeping some of the positive, recent developments. David Austin in England has produced dozens of fragrant shrub roses he considers the best of old and new. Tom Carruth in Los Angeles has bred some sweet-smelling varieties like peppermint striped ‘Scentimental’ for Weeks Roses, the grower that also recently introduced a rose called ‘Night Owl’ with red-violet flowers and a kind of pineapple and spice fragrance.

Fragrant cut roses with daphne, mountain mint, and butterfly bush.