• "Renu's Apricot Tea"

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Discovered by M.S. Viraraghavan (India, before 2011).

Tea Noisette.  

Apricot.  Copper/apricot with yellowish centre. Reddish stems.  Large, borne mostly solitary bloom form.  

This unknown Tea was collected in a friend’s garden on the main Western Ghat Mountains, (western peninsular India) in southern India, at about 3000 feet altitude, 10* North latitude , at a location which gets the full fury of the monsoon rains, nearly 100 inches in a year. This is the heart of the romantic spice growing area, where cardamom and pepper flourish. This rose, which we call “Renu’s Apricot Tea” (our friends Renu and husband Roy --these are their pet names, and whose actual names are Rebecca and Chacko Mani -- own this lovely cardamom plantation called ‘Modale’, near the town of Thekkadi in Kerala State, south India) has very full flowers, globular at bud stage opening to delightful old rose form when weather conditions are right. If the weather is wet, the buds tend to rot. There is again a nice Tea scent. It has proved a very fertile parent in our efforts to create new forms of Tea roses.

Our friend John Hook of the rose nursery Roseraie du Desert in southern France, who specializes in Teas, has this rose, from plant material taken from us, and after studying it for some years , thinks that it may be ‘Madame Beatrice Ephrussi’ a Tea from Nabonnand (France 1912).

If you know the parentage of this rose, or other details, please contact us.

This large shrub was originally from India