Oso Easy® Pathfinder™ Red Landscape Rose

A red rose that does not arrive with a spray schedule attached is a reasonable thing to want. Oso Easy® Pathfinder™ Red, a Proven Winners introduction of Rosa x 'ChewRedmond', is a compact landscape rose that settles at 2 to 3 feet tall and 3 to 4 feet wide, wants full sun, and is hardy in USDA zones 4 through 9. Expect a restrained first summer while the roots take hold, with the plant reaching its mature width in the second or third season.

The flowers hold one true red from bud to drop rather than drifting toward pink or magenta the way many red roses do as they age, and that saturation reads from across a yard against glossy dark green leaves. Proven Winners lists bees among the visitors. The blooms carry a light fragrance, closer to a background note than a perfume, and the stems are long enough to cut for a vase.

Flowering runs from early summer to frost on new wood, so it comes in overlapping waves rather than one June flush. Spent blooms drop on their own, which means no deadheading is required to keep the show going. The habit is dense and mounded, wider than it is tall, which is why it works as a flowering groundcover in a mass planting as readily as it does at the front of a border. It was bred by Warner's Roses of Shropshire, England, the program behind Oso Easy Urban Legend® and Oso Easy Mango Salsa®.

Give it at least six hours of direct sun. In less, it flowers sparsely and grows more prone to leaf spot and powdery mildew. Soil should be moist and well drained, slightly acidic to neutral, and it will not tolerate standing water for any length of time. Space plants 3 to 4 feet apart so air moves through the canopy, which is a large part of how the disease resistance actually holds up in the garden. That resistance is strong but not absolute, and no rose is immune to black spot in a long wet season.