Book  (1988)  Page(s) 15.  
 
('Fen Hong Yeu Yue Hong'; 'Pink Monthly Red'; 'Old Blush'; 'Parsons' Pink') A medium-pink Tea. Shapely double flowers, abundantly borne in clusters on neat plants with crisp, glossy-pointed foliage [similar to floribundas] … the most powerful ancestor of them all... 'Old Blush' reached Sweden in 1752, then England and the United States of America by 1800.

Book  (1988)  Page(s) 68.  Includes photo(s).

Website/Catalog  (1985)  Page(s) 34.  
 
Old Blush.....5 x 4’. 

Website/Catalog  (1984)  Page(s) 8.  
 
China and Tea Roses
Old Blush  (China 1752)
This ancient variety has loose blooms of medium to dark pink in airy clusters that start blooming early and last until frost. Anyone interested in the history of roses should have this plant in the garden. I still find solitary bushes in yards in this part of the country.

Website/Catalog  (1982)  Page(s) 28.  
 
Old Blush (Chinensis) Perpetual silvery pink with a crimson flush. Upright growth. Probably cultivated in China before 10th century. Introduced to Europe about 1790.  Shade tolerant.  N. (C) 3 x 4’. 

Book  (1981)  Page(s) 72-75.  
 
cv. 'Pallida'. Pink or Blush China. --...This 'Parsons' Pink' is the form portrayed by Andrews and later by Redouté....

Through two lines of descent the Pink China is an ancestor of most modern garden roses. Crossed in South Carolina with R. moschata, it gave rise to 'Champney's Pink Cluster'....from which all the Noisettes and Tea roses descend. The second of its ancestral hybrids also arose outside Europe, on the Ile de Bourbon (Réunion), where sometime early in the 19th century it became hybridised with an Autumn Damask, giving rise to the race of Bourbon roses, from which, through the Hybrid Perpetuals, most modern garden roses descend...... It cannot be certain whether in either case it was 'Parsons' Pink' that was involved, as is usually assumed. A Pink China could have reached America at the same time as R. laevigata, by direct import from the Far East, while Réunion in likely to have had the same garden flora as Mauritius, which certainly did not owe its China roses to import from Britain.....

Book  (1979)  Page(s) 217.  
 
[Additional text in the Revised Edition:]
Note for the 1978 Edition
Rosa Chinensis is not in cultivation. The species is a native of central China and is a tall climbing rose, leaves with 3-5 leaflets, flowers single, usually crimson, sometimes pink, produced in summer only. In this book - and many others - the R. chinensis usually quoted is one of four hybrids that were introduced to Europe around 1800, particularly 'Parson's Pink' which is now called 'Old Blush'.

Book  (1973)  Page(s) 28,29.  
 
The first China rose bushes, with botanical records to verify their introduction, to be cultivated in Europe were the 'Old Blush China' and Rosa x odorata. They were sent to Upsala in Sweden in 1752 by PeterOsbeck, who was chaplain to the Swedish ship the 'Prince Charles' and also a friend of Linnaeus. He bought the roses from a nursery garden, Fa-tee, of Canton. Planting material of these roses was sent to England where the 'Old Blush China' was in cultivation before 1759 and plants of Rosa x odorata were established at Kew in 1769. These early introductions were not used for breeding. The later improtationsof these and other repeat-flowering Chinese roses which changed the habis of future European roses.
China Roses by Tess Allen

Book  (1971)  Page(s) 77-78.  
 
[From "Notes on the Origin and Evolution of our Garden Roses" by C. C. Hurst]

The Four Stud Chinas:...
(2) Parsons's Pink China, 1793 (R. chinensis Jacq. x R. gigantea Collett).
Parson's Pink China was first seen in his garden at Rickmansworth in 1793, according to Andrews (1805), and was said by the younger Aiton (1811) to have been introduced from China about 1789 by Sir Joseph Banks. In the Banksian Herbarium there are three specimens of the Pink China, two of which closely resemble Parsons's Pink China; one of these is marked 'China prope Canton, Lord Macartney', and the other 'Hort. Kew 1795 China'. Lindley in 1820, based his R. indica on the Macartney specimen, crediting the collection of it to Sir George Staunton, who accompanied Lord Macartney's embassy to China in 1792. It is therefore possible that Parsons's Pink China was sent home by him to Sir Joseph Banks, who was at that time Director of Kew.
Soon after 1793 Colville secured a stock of Parsons's Pink China, and sent it out as the Pale China Rose, presumably to distinguish it from Slater's Crimson China of 1792. Parsons's pink China soon arrived in France, for it was seen in the greenhouses of Dr Barbier in Paris in 1798, and Thory tells us that he and Redouté started to raise seedlings from it in that year....
Analysis of its characters show the influence of the Wild Crimson China (R. chinensis) in sixteen of these, while the remaining twelve characters show the influence of another species, the Wild Tea Rose (R. gigantea). Parsons's Pink China may therefore be regarded as a hybrid between chinensis and gigantea. It is not, of course, an ordinary primary hybrid produced directly between the two species, but rather a derivative hybrid derived after generations of crossings in Chinese gardens. Parsons's Pink China is a diploid with fourteen chromosmes in the body-cells and seven in both male and female germ-cells. Although a diploid, its chromosmes are not regular in their behaviour and weak pairings in the germ-cell divisions lead to defective pollen and embryo-sacs and consequent sterility. In this respect the Pink Chinas behave as hybrids rather than pure species. Among the newer varities of the Pink China I have found several triploid forms with twenty-one chromosomes, which have no doubt arisen from a duplication of the chromosmes in a pollen or egg-cell, as is in the case of the triploid Crimson Chinas.
 

Book  (1965)  
 
My next choice, I think, would be a China rose. We were lucky in finding a healthy China rose beside the door into the garden. There were one of these roses in the first garden I remember, but we always called them "monthly" roses in those days. The flowers haven't the colour, the shape or the strong perfume of Albertine but they bloom in every month of the year. I have picked them at Christmas, and I enjoy the sight of the Tree in June when it is covered with blossoms. We prune our old rose drastically and spray it when it is attacked by greenfly, and it remains strong and healthy. I think it must have been grown by our back door for at least a hundred years. A friend in the next village was born in this house, and she is now over eighty and says that the rose was there when her parents came to the house a good many years before she was born.

[Mrs Fish's garden, East Lambrook Manor, is in Somerset in the south-west of England]