Belinda's Dream Shrub Rose

You owe it to your gardening forebearers to take a look at this charming rose. Bred by a mathematics professor who spent his life trying to knock out blackspot in the roses he bred (with a good bit of success, we might add), Belinda's Dream is a lavish, over-the-top fragrant beauty of soft pink with an old-fashioned habit, petal-packed hybrid tea bloom form, and disease-resistant foliage that stands up to the worst summer heat and humidity.

The reason we say that Belinda's Dream hearkens back to gardeners of the past is that its seed parent is the 1899 introduction Jersey Beauty. This was an R. wichuriana cultivar, a true rambling rose of the kind you used to see lolling over garden gates and threading through wooden fences. Dr. Robert Basye, the Texas A&M professor who bred Belinda's Dream, realized that the disease-resistant foliage of the old ramblers was ideal for eliminating blackspot and other foliage problems in hybrid teas. So he took as the pollen parent Tiffany, the classic 1954 hybrid tea from Lindquist, crossed the two, and the result was magnificent Belinda's Dream.

This shrub rose boasts huge, fragrant, colorful blooms, a lush habit, and ultra-healthy foliage that stands up to summer thunderstorms and punishing heat alike.

Enjoy these glorious 4-inch blooms of softest pink, redolent of raspberries and so jammed with petals you'll want to call them triple-flowered instead of merely double. The buds are a darker red, so when you have blooms and buds together, the play of colors is lovely.

The hybrid tea form of these blooms is perfect, from their ovoid buds to their high-centered flower form to their gently recurved petal tips. They last a long time in garden or vase, and they keep coming in flushes all summer.

The glossy, dark green foliage of this shrub makes the soft pink color pop dramatically, and even when the plant isn't in bloom, it looks good. Dense, healthy, and attractive, the foliage clothes this 5-foot-high, 5-foot-wide shrub right down to the ground from spring through fall. The shrub has a somewhat loose habit, amenable to being grown over a low wall, spilling over rocks, or remaining upright and true.

Hard to find and very highly prized, Belinda's Dream has been charming gardeners since 1988. Consider it for your landscape this season.