This rose was a mystery until just last week. We have a rose rambling alongside and inside our “Alistair Stella Gray” rose that I knew I didn’t plant. It had to be the rootstock of another rose. Last week, I looked it up and found that most roses are grafted onto the strong growing Dr. Huey.
Dr. Huey may not be the best rose ever developed, but he has his merits. And this time of year, we see him all over Seattle! He is by far the most common rose around, having outlasted all of his fancier grafted tops.
This rose doesn’t have clean foliage, but the flowers have a classic charm and and a wonderfully intense red color that contrast well with the apricot-white of its more robust rambling neighbor.
In 2020, I’ll sneak in and put a fertilizer spike near this plant’s roots and prune it back a bit after flowering.