Among all flowers it is the rose that is loved best. The rose provides one of the most important natural oils indispensable in perfumery. An essential oil of the rose is presently obtained from the Rosa damascena cultivated in Bulgaria and Turkey. And an absolute rose oil is extracted from the Rosa centifolia in southern France and Morocco. These two roses bloom once a year in spring. The important and expensive rose oils have been studied by many workers, and over 270 components have been identified. However only a few reports, if any, have yet appeared on the hybrid tea rose which is the topic of my presentation here.
The hybrid tea rose as a group is one of the major modern roses cultivated as a garden rose today. It was developed and has been bred since the latter half of the nineteenth century by cross breeding the hybrid perpetual rose with the tea rose. The roses which the Goddess of Spring is holding in her arm in the painting, “La Primavera,” painted by Botticelli in the fifteenth century, incidentally, were not the hybrid tea roses commonly found today in our gardens, but were rather the original varieties such as the Rosa gallica, the Rosa alba and the Rosa centifolia.
The hybrid tea rose is characterized by the repeat-flowering properties which originated from the Rosa chinensis (China rose). Numerous varieties have beautiful colors and shapes, and vigorous habit as well.
