Full dark pink flowers with 40 or more petals and a spicy fragrance, carried over glossy dark green foliage. Rosa True Bloom® True Serenity, PP35,453, grows 3 feet tall and wide in full sun, hardy to 10 below zero.
The habit is compact and upright, and the four-inch blooms cut well for arrangements.
True Bloom roses come from Ping Lim, the breeder behind the Easy Elegance line, who set out to cross hybrid tea roses with disease-resistant shrubs and get hybrid tea flowers on a plant that survives without a spray program. Two of them, True Passion and True Inspiration, were distinct enough that the program created a class for them: Hybrid Tea Shrub. They are grown on their own roots rather than grafted, so a plant killed back in a hard winter regrows as itself rather than reverting to rootstock, and there are no suckers from below a graft union. Most are hardy to 10 below zero, and high petal counts are the signature of the line.
It blooms continuously rather than in flushes, so the plant carries flowers from spring through frost.