I love ‘New Zealand’ for its beautifully formed flowers, attractive foliage and distinctive sweet scent but it seems to have become very susceptible to blackspot in Britain. I no longer grow it. I tried ‘Sugar moon’, which is a close descendant, but the scent is nowhere near as refined as in NZ and I hated the thick, graceless stems supporting flowers lacking the delicacy of its progenitor. Then I discovered that ‘Titanic’ is a direct descendant of NZ and CK Jones describes the tea scent as stunning. So I had to try it. The scent on the first bloom is not at at all tea-like, but very strong and sweet, and similar in quality to the linden/lonicera periclymenum scent of NZ. I’m thrilled, and hope the plant will show better disease resistance than NZ.

In Southeast England (cool and mild, zone 8) this rose smells very much like The Doctor and similar to New Zealand (which I think is its grandparent, via Meredith/Chris Beardshaw). It’s a strong but very mellow rose scent, without the slightest touch of tanginess/sharpness/fruitiness, sweet and rich, almost creamy/buttery. There’s no citrus in it at all, not even a hint. The plant has a branching (not bushy) habit, which I quite like. The first bloom this year has been lasting for several days, opening very slowly.

My Destin blooms very little and though it behaved like a bush for a couple of years, now it wants to climb. I cut the outsize cane it threw last year and this year it produced two new shoots right under the cut -- one that suggested I might be able to keep it in check, and now another one that's ridiculously fat and growing a mile a minute. The blooms are beautiful and strongly scented and of course this rare heritage variety is now unobtainable in Britain because of Brexit... So I'll keep it in the hope that if I let it climb to its heart's content (ok, that'll be hard in a pot, but whatever) it will eventually reward me with a decent amount of flowers.