Gertrude Jekyll

Gertrude Jekyll, Austin 1986

Named after the famous garden designer and cottage garden lover Gertrude Jekyll.

This rose was a highly successful cross between Wife of Bath with the famous Portland rose Mme Boll (Wrongly named Comte de Chambord).

It has so many features from Mme Boll: The beautiful pink flat quartered blooms standing just beneath the leafs, typical Portland. Also just like Mme Boll is the very strong Damask or old rose fragrance. It's very very strong and one of the very best examples of old rose fragrance.

Gertrude is flawed as a shrub rose. She gets much too tall and isn't exactly bushy so you mostly get a few large tall canes with a flower at the end.

But as a climber she is superb! I've planted her in 1993 in my parents garden and very quickly I saw she was better as a climber. I planted her next to an arch and now her very long new canes could be trained on the arch. And what I hoped would happen happened: She got dozens of lateral shoots on those long canes and they all started to bloom. I guess the third year we had 120 blooms the first flush. You couldn't see the arch anymore on one side, it was covered with those big flat beautiful flowers. After deadheading those spoiled blooms she took approximately three weeks to rebloom again. A decent second flush but not as abundant as the first. A third flush was in September.

I don't remember her getting blackspot or mildew so she was a very healthy rose.

So my advice is: Don't use her as a normal shrub rose but use her as a climber. She will reward you.