Hello HMF-staff: Could you please change the description concerning the thornes? Cressida is quite thorny and not almost thornless as described.

Thank you!

I planted a rose in my garden this spring that was labeled Dixieland Linda, expecting a pinkish/orangish blossom. When it bloomed, the blossom looked almost indistinguishable from that of Golden Celebration. As luck would have it, I had a Golden Celebration planted not far away and was able to compare the two roses. This blossom was more fragrant, it was just a touch more apricot in color, and less golden. The leaves had the same yellowish tinge, but this rose had considerably more of that sense to them than did Golden Celebration.

For some time I was stumped. Here was a rose that looked almost like Golden Celebration, but actually wasn't. Then we had a very wet August. Across the garden in a much wetter spot blackspot defoliated Cardinal Hume and Gingersnap. The third rose in the garden to get touched was this unidentified rose. Then I remembered growing Cressida in NJ. Late in April it would make leaves which did fine through most of May. The first week in June it would bloom. By the second week in June it would be completely defoliated by blackspot until it made leaves the next spring. It is a great credit to the vigor of Cressida that it can live through a full year and grow at all on four weeks' worth of new foliage; but in the end it was clear that it had become a hazard to slightly more healthy roses and I had to remove it.

So it occurred to me that this unidentified apricot-flowered rose growing in my AZ garden could be none other than Cressida. It is the first time I have ever used extreme susceptibility to a disease to ID a rose!

When I grew Cressida in NJ I found its fragrance a little off-putting. I wrote once that the blossoms of Cressida smelled exactly like paradichlorobenzene, the chemical used in mothballs. In the mid sixties and early seventies the chemical was widely used to fragrance latrines. It carries negative connotations for me. Here in AZ, Cressida's flower presents with a much more balanced scent, admitting some citrus and perhaps old rose scent as well. It is among the best smelling roses in the garden. And the colors are among the prettiest.

If you live in a place where blackspot is such an unusual phenomenon that you cannot ever understand what people are talking about when they complain about it, plant Cressida. But if you live in a place where your roses already suffer from black spot, run away from this rose as fast as you can.