I don't know about THAT, Sherry, but I just learned that the British Hort Society has a color swatch book.

Now THAT is something I want!
An absolutely unimpeachable way to describe the color of a rose!

It looks like a paint-swatch book.
I saw it in a TV piece on Poinsettia growers in SoCal. THEY were using it for descriptions for patenting purposes.

JEri

OK, but I learned my colors from the Crayola crayon box in kindergarten. I don't have a clue about myrrh or old rose or musk or fruity whatever. And mostly it would have no practical effect on me in my garden since I can't grow 90% (seems like) of the roses, but still - my nose has a lust for knowledge.

Sherry

I heard discussion on the radio today about us not having a vocabulary for scent, and how that constrains our ability to discern and describe what we smell. For wines, the suggestion was to actually put peppercorns, nectarine, burnt cork, or other common aromas into a wine glass and smell them, so that you can recognize the fragrance when you detect them in wine. They said that you can train yourself to isolate scent.

I do think that I'm learning what the different rose scents are from years of being around them, and sticking my nose into them, but a scent card is indeed a great idea. We could, perhaps, set up a scent station at our cemetery rose garden events with roses in wine glasses, and let everybody learn what the different fragrances are. Maybe at next April's open garden??? Could be fun!
Anita

but I just learned that the British Hort Society has a color swatch book.

The Rose Manual written by J. H. Nicolas in 1930 has something like this. There are fold-out color plates in the back of the book ... one each for yellow, salmon, pink, and red.

Here's a scan of the red page:

{{gwi:331431}}

The colors beneath each column, in case you can't read them, are Cerise, Vermillion, Scarlet, Amaranth, Magenta, Crimson, Maroon, Garnet, Blood Red.

Connie

Here is a link that might be useful: Hartwood Garden Blog

Hi, all,
That color swatch book is almost incomprehesably expensive. Our ag library doesn't even have it. It doesn't use words, but formulae tied to the specific 'chip' colors. There is one copy in Tennessee that was bought by some major Daylily hybridizers just down the road so that they could submit proper descriptions of some of their plants.
If you read some recent plant patents, you'll see the odd numberical/slases/letters and they tie colors of different parts of the plant back to the RHS Colour charts.

For scents, have you read Delbard's "Diary of a Rose Lover"? It's an exceptional book with no photographs, just beautiful water colors that make me want to take up water colors. In addition, there are descriptions of the scents of the roses, and they are described in three layers (start, middle and finish).

Connie, do you have any feel for those colors remaining true through time? The Cerise to Scarlet just doesn't look that different to me (or is it my moniter?) Thank you for scanning that and putting it here. It's an interesting start.

Sherry,
Have you ever bought a bottle of "Rose Water" from an ethnic grocery? It will bring back first bloom to your nose and then to your mind.

Ann

I have the RHS color swatch book and it's something else. All nuances of color. It's what most breeders and nurseries use when they write patents.

Delbard has a scent triangle they developed which is a nice way to see what the balance of fragrances are. Then when you start sniffing the roses you can try and find those scents in them and thus "educate" your nose.

Scratch and sniff would be cool but I can imagine the cost! How about getting a wine expert or perfume person out to sniff roses and teach about the scents they find in them?

I think it's a wonderful idea. You should patent it sherry!

Ann
I ordered Delbard's book (used/Amazon) 3 days ago and am now even more excited to see it in person. It languished in my "wish list" for quite a while until deciding to go for it.

Sherry
You have such creative ideas. Smell is one of my strongest senses, a blessing and a curse. ("curse" because I can smell "bad" things when no one else can, like when dining out).

Jeri
a swatch book just for roses sounds interesting but what I would love is a universal "color palette" so that a people could communicate thru the internet naming a color and know exactly what color was being named. As an artist I have used Pantone colors for this purpose. It would help my ebay purchases immensely so no ugly surprises, lol. Everyones color monitor is different.

Connie
how very interesting those swatches are. The "crimson" doesn't look like the crimson in my mind. Red is a very fugitive color so perhaps has changed from it's print date of 1930.

Denise

Anita, I think your "scent station" is a fantastic idea - maybe multiple locations to accommodate the crowds. Communicable germs just occurred to me, but we won't go there. Remember in the movie "French Kiss" Luke shows Meg Ryan his childhood 'wine box' with all the herbs/fungal stuff in bottles? After she smelled the herbs she could taste them in the wine. Training my nose is a good idea.

Connie, I remember seeing charts like that in "Tea Roses for Warm Climates". Like Denise, the colors in that chart and yours don't jive with the ones I know, such as crimson. Crimson is some sort of red to me and in your chart it's pink to my brain. I guess rose people (and maybe horticulturalists in general) assigned their own names to the colors without consulting Crayola or others. Plus I suppose they date way back.

Ann, I have read about the scent layers and the triangle, but I forget which book(s). I'll have to put Delbard's book on my list. And I will have to buy some rose water. That's a good idea.

Paul, when the wine tasters are trained (they must be trained, right?), they must sample all the fragrances that can comprise the wine experience. Rose people should have such a thing, too.

Buford, I'd love to, but I'm starting from such a deep hole experientially, I can't imagine what it would take to educate myself in order to do it. I guess I have to acquire a lot of spices, herbs, earthy things like mushrooms, rose water, fruits, and who knows what else and make my own "rose box". It sounds exciting. Maybe I could try. I'll have to Google it. But I doubt there's a patent in my future.

Denise, a few years ago when I was buying a lot of home dec fabric online, I bought a "color swatch" book. One seller adhered to it very well, but most did not. It really was helpful, because you can't rely on color accuracy from cameras & monitors. I think it used numbers and letters like Ann described the RHS charts. I suppose educating myselve on the colors that rose people use would be the better thing than relying on Crayola. So now I have to unlearn in order to learn a whole new system - if I care to get that deep into it. And as to smells, it's so frustrating to be able to "catch" the elements of a fragrance and not know what they are and also know I'm missing others totally.

I love everyone's comments. Very enlightening.

Sherry

Sherry - I think this is brilliant. I would think that vendors that send out catalogs (David Austin, of course, comes to mind) could include a few 'scratch and sniff' pieces. Perhaps not every rose, but every 10th rose or so - what a selling point! I would imagine their sales would go way up. Who could resist buying a rose that has a beautiful picture AND a beautiful fragrance?

Your DH must be very creative.

At least I hope the link is specific enough.
From the google: plant patents; this decade; patents granted, I chose this one at random and the descrriptions that use the RHS are not just for the petals, but for the stems' and leaves' colors, which are expressed as ranges between two identifiers.
"Prickle color is between 164D and 165D and slightly translucent."

Here is a link that might be useful: Floribunda rose.....description

Here are the other three color charts, just for giggles. I think the colors have changed in the 80+ years since the book was printed ... and I had to scan with the lid of my scanner open, so not to mash the book, and there may be some variation because of this.

Plate I: Yellow

{{gwi:331432}}

Plate II: Salmon

{{gwi:331433}}

Plate III: Pink

{{gwi:331434}}

Merry Christmas, Everyone.
Connie

Here is a link that might be useful: Hartwood Garden Blog

Good post!
Another book waiting to be written (I think) is a chemical analysis of rose scents but written for general readers who are rose lovers. The chemical composition of rose scents would be related to chemically similar fragrances, along with sensory descriptions, that is, what our noses tell us. In other words, I want the verbal equivalent of the scent samplers others have mentioned here. I don't know if there's such a book on the subject of perfumery. I'd like to know more about scent, objectively as well as subjectively described.
Sounds like the Delbard book is going on my wish list. The RHS color book would be if it weren't expensive.
Melissa

Nice idea Melissa. It would be nice if someone wrote one covering say a broad range of 100 widely grown roses from Old to New that we could use to educate our noses. A perfume person would be great and in fact Delbard uses "Noses" as they are called, to build the scent triangles.

The book sounds great but it needs a "kit" to go with it.

I found the article! It's by Henri Delbard in the 2007 American Rose Annual. The triangle consists of 3 parts:

Top/head
citrus (lemon, mandarin, bergamot...)
aromatics (aniseed, lavender, citronella...)

Middle/heart
floral (rose, jasmine, lilac...)
greenery (grass, ivy, leaves...)
fruit (raspberry, pear, peach...)
spices (cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon...)

Bottom/base
wood (cedar, patchouli, moss...)
balsam (vanilla, heliotrope, tonka bean...)

"The most volatile notes - those we smell first - belong to two families, the citrus and the aromatic; they are the most fleeting and constitute the "head" notes of the perfume. This is the perfume's spirit. Then come the notes of flowers, fruits, spices and plants. These are the perfume's heart, it's personality. These soon give way to the lower, heavier components, which form the wake of the perfume with the deep and lasting notes - wood and balsam."

He also says that after the first sniff "memory has to go to work. In your personal collection of scents, there must be something similar." Hence, my need for a smell kit.

I just ordered his "Diary of a Rose Love" and a book called "The Rose's Kiss - A Natural History of Flowers" by Peter Bernhard. Does anyone have this book?

Sherry

From "Roses for Dummies": a lot of them are HTs but perhaps they'll be recognizable.

Apple: 'New Dawn', 'Honorable Lady Lindsay'
Apple and clove: 'Souvenir de la Malmaison'
Apple, clove, parsley, and lemon: 'Eden Rose'
Apple, rose, and clove: 'Zephirine Drouhin'
Bay: 'Radiance'
Classic rose scent: 'Parfum de Lowe', 'Scentsational' 'Seattle Scentsation'
Clove: 'Dainty Bess'
Fern and moss: 'Queen Elizabeth'
Fruit: 'Fragrant Plum'
Lemon: 'Confidence'
Lily of the valley: 'Madame Louis Leveque'
Linseed oil: 'Persian Yellow'
Nasturtium: 'Buccaneer'
Orris: 'Golden Masterpiece'
Orris and raspberry: 'Kordes' Perfecta'
Orris and violet: 'Golden Dawn'
Quince: 'Sutter's Gold'
Raspberry: 'Angel's Mateu'
Rose and clove: 'Chrysler Imperial', 'Dolly Parton', 'Fragrant Cloud'
Rose and lemon: 'La France', 'Mirandy', 'Tiffany'
Rose and nasturtium: 'Sarah Van Fleet'
Rose and parsley: 'American Beauty'
Spice: 'Soleil d'Or', 'Scentimental', 'Ain't She Sweet', 'Secret'
Violet: 'Margaret McGredy'
Wine: 'Vandael'

I read that Orris is very similar to violets.

Just noticed that 'Chrysler Imperial' has a "rose & clove" scent. Does that mean that the 'rose' scent is the 'damask' scent?

Sherry

I think Sherry is on to something. I know what cloves smell like, but what is the difference between rose, old rose, classic old rose, damask rose and alba rose? I see these descriptions all the time, but unless I can find these flowers, I don't know how they smell. I want to know how they smell before I decide what roses to order. Some of the flowers are not available in my area, so how can I smell them? It's the chicken and the egg :)

Didn't the Jackson and Perkins catalogs of my childhood (30-40 years ago) have scented paper? I'm pretty sure they did. I used to tear them out and put them with my clothes in the dresser until the scent faded.

The color swatches you're scanning and describing are the Pantone ink samples. A Pantone book was 60 dollars the last time I bought one-probably more now.
The formulas Ann is describing are the amounts of ink to make a color.
The internet computer colors are RGB- red, green, blue, which is what the human eye sees. Common printing colors are Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Printing is becoming obsolete, being replaced by color copiers. unfortunately. so hard saying what will occur. Ink doesn't match house paint nor dyes nor toner nor rose petals. They are all different.
I bought a bottle of Victoria by Victoria's Secret 15 years ago in Salt Lake. We didn't have VC here at the time. I smelled it in a magazine and had to have it. It was 40 dollars for 3.5 ounces. I gave it to my daughter eventually, who wore it a lot and said it was magic.
VC sells nothing but cheap teenybopper perfume now. The perfume had run out and there was no place to get more. I typed "Victoria's Secret perfume from 15 years ago" into google and up came Martecci's, which replicates perfumes that companies have quit making.
It cost me 60 bucks for one ounce which is not as strong. but my daughter had a merry Christmas. The other thing she wanted was a vacuum cleaner.
I think you would have to pay dearly to get a book with different rose perfumes.

Pity they didn't list old roses with their scents, as I know them much better, and they're generally less of a hybrid soup than the moderns listed. The 'linseed oil' description for 'Persian Yellow' is interesting. This is the Rosa foetida scent: what gives it the botanical name of 'Stinking Rose'. I think it's an interesting scent, heavy and warm and not nasty at all, but have always thought of it as a 'fat' smell, just as I think of Chardonnay, among all wines, as having a 'fat' quality. To my nose the scent of R. pimpinellifolia, the Scotch Rose, is similar in character to that of R. foetida. I like both these smells both by themselves and when blended with other notes in hybrids like 'Agnes' (R. foetida hybrid) and 'Fruehlingsgold' (R. pimpinllifolia hybrid). The other parent of 'Fruehlingsgold' is the very fragrant HT 'Joanna Hill', and the mixture in 'Fruehlingsgold' is delightful.
Melissa

I think Persian Yellow does stink, but Harison's Yellow is much better. I like the original smell of rosa foetida. I think it is what it is crossed with.
I got General Washington awhile back. It came in the box with a rose on it. i went to smell it and it smelled rotten. Some more buds bloomed and they also smelled rotten.
Anybody else had this experience?

Hmmmm. I thought 'Persian Yellow' was a double-flowered sport of R. foetida, not a hybrid....could doubling the bloom, with resultant changed count of petals and stamens, have altered its scent? Could the sporting have changed the scent in some other fashion? Pure speculation here.

I've never encountered a rose that I actually thought smelled bad. I never cared much for the fragrance of 'Sombreuil', but even in the days before I knew it was thought to be a Wichurana hybrid rather than the climbing Tea I bought it as, I thought the scent had nothing of Tea in it, and was closer to the 'green apple' fragrance of the Wichuranas. This is probably the fragrance I like least of all rose scents, but after all it adds variety.
Melissa

Zephirine Drouhin is one of the first roses to bloom here in Pa.---I can't describe the fragrance but only to say it is delicious and a most welcome fragrance after a long winter.
I just bury my nose it the bloom and I'm in heaven----can't wait till I have some lucious flowers----

This is a very interesting post---

Florence

When I was a kid my grandmother used to get the J&P rose catalogs. They had scented pages in the center, and when you opened up the catalog you'd get that powerful aroma of roses (and then for me I'd promptly sneeze!).

Believe it or not, there are people that are seriously allergic to rose fragrance (and other scents), so that could create a problem for shipping catalogs with scent, on top of the extravagant cost such a thing would entail. Still, it'd be wonderful if there were a book or something that could capture the scents in roses. I wonder if it's even possible to capture the scent of all types of roses and have it last in a book, or if the scents would all be at war with one another.

--Ron

lemecdutex (Ron) has brought up what I was thinking all through my reading of this thread: For me, this is another nail in my coffin. My nose is extremely sensitive, and not in a good way. I love the scents of the Teas, but there are times (when I'm working in the Sacramento Cemetery Garden) when my nose actually hurts, and I get a headache - this is when things are at the height of bloom, and it comes mainly from the really strongly scented roses. I love being there and working with the roses, so I try to think of it as a price willingly paid, like sunburn, etc. But catalogs that have been scented can just pole-ax me, and the world lately has become so fragrance-happy that those of us that can't handle it (and there a LOT of us) are in a bad way, because it's EVERYWHERE. I think, though I'm not sure, that most perfumes are now made in laboratories out of chemicals, rather than in France, from flowers. And I also think that the scents on paper are made up, at least in part, of chemicals that have been formulated to approximate a particular real fragrance - and the chemicals are a big part of why some people have such an extreme reaction.

I've also noticed, in reading on this forum, that people seem to actually "read" rose fragrances differently, according to their individual nose, or olfactory nerve perhaps. Some people smell a tea fragrance, others smell it but don't think it "tea-like". Some consider Teas to be virtually scentless. I read the Tea thing more often than references to the fragrances of other classes, but I think there is probably an individual reaction to those, also.

Sherry, I hope your DH doesn't feel insulted by my negative input. I'm sure it seems like a wonderful idea to everyone who loves all those smells, and they are, after all, in the majority. And, anyway, this is all probably just a delightful and jolly discussion, just to run with. Because, actually, I think the cost of such a book/catalog would be prohibitive - that is, if they had to get a good match of all those different roses. Of course, THEN we could have one of those wonderful long threads with people disagreeing like mad about whether a page REALLY smelled like Duchesse de Brabant...

Laura

Laura, DH would not be insulted at all. :)) I still wish I knew what all the fragrances smell like. I have never smelled a nasturtium or a violet. I have smelled wine but never in a rose. I know what cloves smell like but haven't detected it in Chrysler Imperial, but I have detected lemon in my Tiffany. Our rose society has a 'pruning' meeting early in the spring. Maybe they should have a 'fragrance' meeting during the spring flush with members bringing roses that they grow with the various fragrances. Among all the members there are probably many represented. Maybe that would be too boring for most and maybe not. How many times do we smell a rose and have no clue what we're smelling?

Interestingly, Queen Elizabeth became immensely popular with the fragrance of ferns and moss??? That's odd.

Sherry

This is a very enjoyable thread. I'm not at home so don't have my reference books (or roses) handy, so can't jump in as I'd like. We are talking about doing something with fragrances during the Sacramento Cemetery's Open Garden, maybe just as simple as roses in snifters (we'll call them sniffers) that exhibit some of the different scents.

Queen Elizabeth and Eden are two that I consider essentially scentless. And yes, I think that "rose," "old rose" and "damask" are the same scent.

I've read that the phenol that is found in Tea roses is the same as is found in tea, so that chemically, if not olfactorily, Tea roses do indeed smell like tea. I'm always amazed at people who claim the Duchesse de Brabant smells only of raspberries, no tea at all, when to me it's like opening up a tin of black tea (perhaps a raspberry-flavored black tea).

I think I'm allergic to pollen, not fragrance, but often I can't smell much in the garden. Still, I love to stick my nose in a rose and take a deep breath, just in case there's something delicious to be whiffed!
Anita

If anybody has Clair Martin's '100 Old Roses for the American Garden' and ditto 'English Roses', he does a wonderful job describing scents. His vocabulary almost reminds me of a wine-taster's vocabulary.

Someone mentioned getting a bottle of rose water from the ethnic section of the grocery store. You can use it in lieu of vanilla extract when you are making baked goods. I like to make sugar cookies according to the usual recipe, then decorate them with icing made with rose water. Why just smell it when you can eat it as well?

Anita, very interesting about Queen Elizabeth and Eden. I would have thought that ferns & moss don't have much smell. Duchesse de Brabant always smelled like sweet iced tea to me. I didn't get the raspberry scent from her. It's kind of weird that I don't think I smell the tea when I'm drinking it - just taste, so the 'translation' to something I can smell in the rose is a little amazing. Good example of how the olfactory system is connected with smell and taste. Another thing about DdB is that when I take the first whiff I always want to go back for a second, but the second whiff is either not there or very faint. Did I get it ALL in the first whiff or did my nose get saturated?? Frustrating though because I want to keep on imbibing that fragrance. Louis Philippe is one that continues to give me his lovely smell. I always want to tape the flower to my nose. :)) Hmmm, I may try that.

mille fleurs, I'll have to get that book. I've been tempted by it many times, but now I have a good reason. Your icing sounds wonderful.

Sherry

What a thread. Truly unbelievable, albeit somewhat entertaining.

Some ferns and mosses have great smell, take Fougère soap as an example or the oak moss "noses" use for the woody base note of many perfumes.

Louberts pack their roses covered in damp dark green moss. Opening the box was a sensation in itself even before I saw the roses, like walking in a French wood.

mariannese, I've never had the pleasure of receiving flowers from Louberts :(( I guess my senses have really missed out! Thanks for adding this to the discussion.

Sherry

Yes, thanks indeed, Mariannese. That's truly a wonderful addition.

Sherry, Viola odorata grows wild all over the place here and is in flower now. The scent wafts, and I've wondered whether the plant itself is fragrant and not just the flowers. The fragrance is wonderful. "Suave" is the word that always occurs to me: rich but soft, sweet but nothing at all akin to sugary. Florida has fine violets of its own, but non of them are fragrant as far as I know, and I doubt Viola odorata would grow there. The violet scent my husband found for me is convincing--we are next door to Parma, after all--and if you're curious and like fragrance, perhaps you could get yourself a bottle. It really is a scent like none other.
Melissa