“A brand new way to love roses. On your plate! The new line of Flavorette roses will transform your garden from just viewable, to edible! Each rose was bred for reliable landscape performance and excellent taste, so you’ll get the best of both worlds.”
I wonder exactly how one would “breed for excellent taste”? Would you like cross ‘Hot Chocolate’ with ‘Marshmallow Fluff’?
This collection was introduced in the EU a couple years ago by PhenoGeno Roses as Taste of Love. The one you sent is known here as Eveline Wild or Natalija Frayla. Most varieties from this class seem to be coming from other breeding programs and are often introduced in more than one collections (just like Eveline Wild in the taste of love collection, Natalija Frayla in the Fragrant Frayla collection). I guess they go around their test fields and taste the blooms of their seedlings.
The six varieties from this collection I grow are very diverse, probably coming from completely separate breeding lines:
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Eveline Wild is an arching shrub, abundant and countinuous bloom. Good disease resistance, but not spotless. Nice fruity scent. Didn’t set OP hips, nay try pollinate it next season. Very few anthers (about 4/5 per bloom)
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Theo Clevers is a strong growing shrub, it gets taller than stated. Blooms well, but not as much as Eveline. Its color is a strong pink with a medium-strength scent. Healthy, but the plant architecture may not be optimal (my plant is not mature yet). I suspect this may be completely sterile (no anthers, no OP hips seen)
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Renée Van Wegberg is a nice old fashioned floribunda. Strong scent, pink. Good, not excellent, blackspot resistance.
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Dolce is probably more of a landscape shrub; cerise pink, very substantial blooms. The fragrance is clearly there on the first day, but older blooms are scentless.
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Nadia Zerouali is a strong growing hybrid tea; medium yellow flowers, nice fragrance. It does get blackspot at the end of the season. It set a couple OP hips, with good germination; the flowers produced to hips formed ratio makes me think it would not be the best choice as a mother plant. Its pollen worked on The Wedgwood Rose
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Pear is a small shrub, very similar to some older Austins. It may be a healthier alternative to those. Good rebloom, nice fruity/myrrh scent. It set a good number of OP hips last year, with decent germination.
What makes them good to eat? I would imagine texture and essential oils. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. Marketing strategy?
I have been using rose petals in various recipes for a couple years. The first requirement is that you have to be able to grow them no spray.
If you go around your garden tasting your roses you’ll notice that most of them are tasteless to unpleasant, with just a few having a pleasant taste. The two factors are flavor and texture. Most hybrid teas, especially if they have thick petals, taste like plastic. Some of them have a good flavor, but have an unpleasant texture; in this case, you may still use them to make rose petals jam, tea or you can put them in pure alcohol to make a rose liquor.
Whatever the taste may (or may not) be, the PW series name reminded me instantly of Nicorette, and I can’t quite shake the association…
Oh man. That would have been an easy sell for my grandma. She loved that stuff.