Wish I could smell the picture!!! What a healthy good looking shrub with gorgeous blooms. Is that just one rose? Thank you Sara-Ann!

PS my three OR are doing great. They are about 2’ tall and 1’ wide, covered with buds, I like their healthy dark green leaves. They don’t seem to be too demanding for water though in full sun. Since they are new, no dripping system assigned to them yet so I hand water them every two days

Thank you zz! Yes, it’s just one big, fragrant bush!

What a beauty! To think I accidentally brought one home that had been placed in a row of ‘Sweet Mademoiselle‘s’! I SO regret going back and exchanging it. It’s beautiful, Sara Ann! Lisa

I’m glad yours are doing good zzzone, hope you post pictures. Lisa, Sweet Mademoiselle is a lovely rose. How has it done for you?

When I got my Orchid Romance I didn’t realize it was bred by the same breeder who brought us Knockout Roses. Recently I’ve been more attentive about where a rose comes from, especially since I’m more aware of whose roses have a tendency to perform good for me, etc. it’s not that I think Knockout roses aren’t good roses, I think the market has been over saturated with them, and frankly IMO they’re not the real thing! So, I probably would not have gotten OR if I had known that at the time. About most things I’m not a snob, just in that one way, I try to refrain from saying too much to people I know who are proud of their Knockout Roses, and there are quite a few!

To be frank, prior to learning this beautiful rose world, I was like most people, knockout rose and florist rose are pretty much all I knew about rose. Knockout rose no doubt has been very successful for landscaping use (I admire its disease resistance) but once you entered this rose wonderland, knockout rose quickly became “fast food” in some ways.

I will take some pics of OR when I glet home. By the way, Sara-Ann, if you are interested in knowing Sweet Mademoiselle, I have six of them planted last spring. They are among my top 5 performers. Not blooming yet so I’ll update in a short while.

I just took this one this evening. The three 2’ tall little roses are planted 20” apart in a triangle. I think I planted too close oh well I can always move them in winter once they get to size of Sara-ann’s. Look at their healthy glossy dark green foliage and buds!

They look great zz!

Nice looking OR plants, zz! The foliage is so perfect and healthy looking. You have lots of beautiful blooms to look forward to.

Sara ann, (I hope I don’t offend zz, since she has 6 of them, and clearly loves them), I find Sweet Mademoiselle‘s color too bright and unnatural looking. I realize it’s all a matter of preference, and we all like different things. I’m glad for that, because the world would be pretty boring if we all had the same tastes. I have shamelessly ignored mine, and allowed sweet peas to cover it. I really need to remove it, but I need help for a job like that. It’s on Dr. Huey, so I better get a move on it. That being said, it did produce a rather pretty bloom the other day. It wasn’t nearly as fluorescent as the blooms she produced all of last year. If she would keep blooming that color, I would like her a lot better. We’ve had a very cool spring, with more than the usual rainfall. I’ll have to see what she does as things heat up around here. She’s super fragrant, and the bloom I cut from Sweet Mademoiselle was huge! I think I have a picture of it in my hand.

Found it! This is a MUCH nicer color than what I got last year. I hope she stays this light. Lisa

Lisa, not at all, no worries. We all have our personally preference, different opinions and distinctive landscaping design ideas. Plus one rose can perform exceptionally well in ones garden but a total dud in another.

Sara-Ann, I have been very satisfied with my Sweet Mademoiselle. In general, I am not too crazy about many HT but this is an exception. I lIke it’s growth habit, the bloom form, the foliage, the fragrance, the petal thickness, the leaf size and the not-so-thorny stems, and the vase life. Of course the disease resistance is wonderful. It’s bloom doesn’t ball in rain or fade or fall apart in heat. It will stay evergreen in zone 7B if I let it. The bloom color is slightly more intense than what I am used to (I’m more of a muted DA color person) but I still like it a lot. It’s a reliable performer requiring low-maintenance in my garden together with Bolero and most Kordes roses.

It really looks good zz, yours are going to do great! Thank you too Lisa for the info on Sweet Mademoiselle. Zz is right, we should never be offended at others taste in roses. And roses can perform and look so different, depending on where they are grown also. And we all have different color tastes too. It would get pretty old if we all liked the same thing. I enjoy seeing roses that other people grow beautifully that wouldn’t look good in my garden. BTW, your picture of Sweet Mademoiselle is lovely!

I’ve got buds but no blooms. Usually not until mid May. Your garden must be at least 3 weeks ahead of mine.

That Orchid Romance does look great, zz! How I wish I hadn’t returned mine when I discovered it wasn’t Sweet Mademoiselle! I have two Princess Charlene de Monaco‘s, and I absolutely love them. I was totally thinking Sweet Mademoiselle was going to be a pinker version of PCDM. All the Romantica roses have done incredibly well for me. I just never expected SM to be so bright and coral looking. I actually felt irrationally annoyed every time I saw her blooms last year. I had no one to help me remove it, and I felt like SM was taunting me with every fluorescent neon bloom. She was SO bright I couldn’t stand it, and not even 100F heat and full sun would fade her. It could be that she’s just that artificial color in my soil and climate. I’ve seen pictures of SM that looked great, and nothing like my gaudy beacon of a thing. If she looks like that again this year, I’ll have to call in some favors and have one of my sons come remove her.

I too, prefer the softer colors of DA’s. I did purchase Boscobel last year, and that’s a stretch for me. Boscobel is a little brighter than I prefer, but it changes with the temps. Boscobel‘s color is more like what I thought Sweet Mademoiselle would be. Sweet Mademoiselle likes to grow super tall, too. It looks like Orchid Romance stays shorter. Oh, this thread has me regretting my return all over again! Lisa

Sara-Ann, I was browsing my 20000 pics in my phone (I know that’s crazy, took forever to find the pic I am looking for), I came across this starred pic of OR I took during my local botanical garden visit a year ago. I visited there in order to see some varieties in person for buying decisions. I must be impressed with this rose and picked it as the “must have” out of thousands of candidates growing at the garden at that time but later somehow lost track. Now I have three thriving in my garden. What a coincidence or karma I should say :)

I cannot praise enough about this rose’s vigor and outlook. The shrub shape, the foliage, the flower...everything I wanted.

Lisa, Sweet Mademoiselle does appear to be a more intense coral and her color has stayed that way for me either in sun or shade. I don’t know if there’s a way we could help tune the coral hue by amending the growing environment (soil or PH) but maybe in the near future technology will be able to help.

Their color did not cause disharmony for me is largely because they were placed in a rose bed consisting of only lighter and softer color roses. Therefore no color clash virtually. I have only white, soft yellow, peach and apricot color roses around them, such as Charlotte, Carding Mill, Bolero, Polka, Alnwick, Lady of Shalott, Teasing Georgia and Abe Darby. I think if I plugged in a rose with a blue/purple undertone, such as Munstead Wood or Twilight Zone or Princess Anne, it would make her standout and look out of the place. She is beautiful on her own but her color is surely not the easiest to work with in a rose bed.

This is a pic I took last year. She’s picked with her fellow roses from the same bed. She’s being the strongest color rose and everybody else did help soften her.

It is a very good rose, and so disease resistant, and fragrant, which I love. How wonderful that you have a nearby place to visit to see how different varieties do in your area.

zz, we were posting at the same time, that’s a lovely arrangement of SM, etc.

Sara-Ann, just got the first bloom of Sweet Mademoiselle today. Looks surreal! The nights have been cool this week, temperatures must have an effect on its coloring.

Thank you zz it’s lovely!

To be honest, I always thought that Orchid Romance was not a very exciting pink rose, but when I saw it at a nursery today, I saw that it has some nice lavender tones to it that don’t come across in photos. But more importantly (to me) was the fragrance. Wow! There is a strong and lovely fragrance, a mid-tone sweetness that is not cloying or or candy like, but a rich fragrance and a crisp woody element that reminds me of litchi seed (not so much the fruit but the seed). Even my husband said, ”wow!” He said it smelled citrusy to him. Firefighter next to it didn’t get a comment or a second sniff.