Commercially available

• Akira Ogawa ™
• VIRrosea

2 favorite votes.  

Pink blend Shrub.
Registration name: VIRrosea
Exhibition name: Rose Legend

Bred by M.S. Viraraghavan (India, before 2016).

Shrub.  

Pink, white center, light pink reverse.  Mild fragrance.  Average diameter 3".  Single (4-8 petals), in small clusters bloom form.  

Medium, bushy.  Medium, glossy, medium green foliage.  

Height: up to 4' (up to 120cm).  

Can be used for container rose or garden.  

This is perhaps the very first seedling with laevigata rosea as one parent. Laevigata rosea is a rose species/hybrid from Japan. A pink form of Rosa laevigata. We have always been fascinated with this rose and Viru has tried to work with it in his hybridizing programme. This seedling , with quite a complicated parentage of the seed parent, is a lovely shrub which has constantly a number of butterfly like single flowers, very dainty and appealing. We have watched over this rose for many years, and liked it very much. We wanted to name it for someone in Japan as we felt that would be most appropriate. Of our rose friends there, we had already named ‘Blushing Yuki’ for Dr Yuki Mikanagi, and ‘Maebara’s Dream’ for Mr. Katsuhiko Maebara, the Curator of the Kusabue-no-Oka Heritage Rose Garden in Sakura City, near Tokyo. The one very good and old rose friend from Japan whom we had so far not honored with one of our roses was Prof. Akira Ogawa, whom we have known from 2000 when we met him at the Houston Texas World Rose Conference. This was the very first rose conference that we attended, and as fellow Asians, Akira as leader of the group from Japan, took us under his wing. We have been very close to him since, and seeing how well this rose performed in all weathers, as it did in Japan too, in the Sakura Garden, we felt that if Prof Ogawa agreed to let us name this rose for him we would be most privileged. He did agree and he has a plant growing well with him. We wanted to give the name ‘Rose Legend – Akira Ogawa’ to this rose, but being the modest and humble person that he is ( and which quality endears him most to us and all others who are his friends) he insisted that it be called only ’Akira Ogawa’. So, to humor him, we have called it ‘Akira Ogawa’ in Japan, and ‘Rose Legend’ in other countries.