Rosa 'AUSrumba' GENTLE HERMIONE® hybrid tea shrub rose / English rose (David Austin)

GENTLE HERMIONE® is an English rose by David Austin from 2005, named after a fictional character of Hermione, a beautiful and faithful wife of the King of Sicily from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. It is a tea-hybrid rose with fully double, strongly fragrant flowers which emerge soft, pale pink with light apricot orange hues and mature almost white with only light pink tones. The fragrance is deep, myrrh. It blooms repeatedly from June until October and forms rather a large shrub 120-130 cm tall and 140 cm wide. Deciduous leaves are medium to dark green, matte, and disease resistant. This rose is very hardy (down to abt. -32 °C – USDA zone 4b), and suitable for pots. US patent No. PP17500 was granted in 2007.

Planting instructions: Prepare a hole of size 30x30 cm. Put your rose in the way that the grafting point is 3 cm deep in the soil. Water well and cover new shoots with soil or bark mulch about 15 cm high. Roses tolerate wide range of soils but thrive in deep, humus-rich, moist but well-drained soil, in full sun.

Pruning: English roses don’t require hard pruning like tea hybrids. Just cut last year’s growth by one third to maximum one half in the spring (after frosts) to achieve desired shape, and strong and reliable framework. Cutting it back to 3-5 live buds is possible for re-juvenating. To support extra flowering during the season remove twigs past blossom: cut them off the first leaf with 5 leaflets. Mulch well before winter, preferably with leaf-mould.

Last update: 25-09-2020