Thank you all for responding to my post! I appreciate all of your help with this rose bush. I do not think it is sexy rexy because I thought it might be that rose, so I ruled it out when I went to a rose show in my area today and saw sexy rexy. In fact, saw two of them and they were too light and too pink to match my rose. I do think this is a grandiflora rose since all roses are in a cluster. I am posting a couple more pictures of my rose to show how it looks when it starts to fade. (when it fades it turns more pink) I also did a petal count on one rose and count was 43. I also am thinking if it is not Camelot it could be Montezuma. I was looking in some old JP catalogs and saw Montezuma and looked very similar. Does anyone else have this rose or Camelot? I am leaning towards Camelot because the shape of the bush looks just like my mom's 50 yr old Queen Elizabeth. The leaves are very large and this bush is very disease resistant. Thanks again for all your help and I have enjoyed reading responses.

It's not always easy to figure them out. Fred Boutin told me that, when he found a beautiful pink rose in Altadena, CA he didn't worry about giving it a "fancy" Study Name. He felt that a rose that good would be quickly identified, so he just called it "Altadena Drive Pink HP." That was in 1979. Many subsequent discoveries and study names later -- many identification suggestions later -- we still don't know for sure what Historic Identity that rose had. We're still calling it "Grandmother's Hat" -- its second and best-known Study Name. Jeri

HMF is a web site called "Help Me Find/roses" - just google it and it will pop up. You can look up any rose if you know its name. Across the top are buttons - one of them says "buy from", and tells you which nurseries sell that rose. Note - be sure and click on the button way at the bottom of the list - it will show all of the nurseries. Otherwise, the first list you see is only nurseries who donate to Help Me FInd. Great that your family still owns the property - you now have access to family heirloom plants! Also, you know that this rose grows and survives in your climate. If you can get your grandmother's permission, you might even want to transplant one of the bushes to your garden - now while it is still dormant is a good time to do that. Of course, you have to wait until the ground is not frozen. Then you just figure out where one of the roses is, and cut it WAY back - I mean, to about 18 inches high. Then you dig it up very carefully, trying to get as much of the root ball as possible - get a shovel and dig straight down all around it, at least 12-18 inches away from where the canes are coming up. Then, dig a LARGE hole in your garden, and plant it, adding "planting mix" to fill up the hole, and water it in well. Then, do not feed it or spray it - just make sure it stays moist. At first it will "do nothing", because it is growing roots under the ground where you cannot see them. Then, after 2-3 months, it will start putting out new growth - that is when you can feed it. Peonies don't like to be dug up and transplanted, but it is great that you can enjoy them. Let us know what else comes up - take pictures and post them on here! Jackie

The more I look at the first photo, the more I think Tea, and not HT. I just don't remember seeing photos of any early HT's with that particular quilling tendency. If I'm wrong, please educate me. The second photo looks rather like 'Testout', but I'm not sure her flowers are the right form to be the rose in the first photo? Tessiess, the first photo looks like 'La France to you? Do you think the foliage looks right for 'LF'? It's useful to remember that many Teas bred after the 19th Century were introduced because they had some of the HT-like qualities considered desirable at the time (upright growth and flowers that were less inclined to nod, for example). It seems likely that some roses introduced as Teas were actually hybrids. In an earlier thread we discussed the likelihood that the original (probably lost) 'Francis Dubreuil' had a richness of color that suggested it may have been more HT than Tea in ancestry. When Melissa recently asked about Teas that remained small, Ingrid mentioned 'Enchantress', which was (and is) classed as a Tea, but had an HT (yes, 'Caroline Testout') as a parent. When Henry Bennett introduced 'Viscountess Folkestone', he was reluctant to disclose her parentage, but went to some trouble to explain that she was a pure-bred Tea; he was ignored and his contemporaries insisted that it was an HT, as it is still usually classed today. My point here (circuitously expressed) being that it may not be easy to distinguish late Teas from early HT's. If the flower in question has an old-rose fragrance, that does argue in favor of an early HT, such as the famously fragrant 'La France'... Virginia