Clotilde Soupert

Rosa 'Clotilde Soupert'

This is a beautiful Polyantha rose, a group of roses with petite blossoms and form. Although not quite miniature roses, they are quite different than your average rose shrub. (As if roses are anything average!) Other famous Polyanthas include Cecile Brunner, Marie Pavie and her sister Marie Daly, Pinkie and The Fairy. While most of the time they are diminutive in form, barely reaching above three or four feet, many of them have been developed as climbing sports; Cecile Brunner’s climbing variety tends to be more popular than its original compact shrub.

I can’t imagine why one wouldn’t just love to have this rose in their garden. It takes so little space, could be used mingling amongst other perennials, and basically is like a petite Souvenir de la Malmaison, which is the most beautiful rose I have ever seen. It’s blooms are the same color and intensely double, quartered look of Malmaison’s (what rose descriptions often call “cabbagey”), and the same rich, dreamy fragrance. They open the same way, slowly, the buds peeling back and the bloom gradually turning into a lush open flower and then gradually browning on the stem. It doesn’t drop its petals. In cooler weather the blooms can last almost two weeks. This gradual revealing of beauty and its elegant fading into old age seems to be so very French.

It is nearly constantly blooming, unlike Souvenir de la Malmaison, and although in very hot weather the blooms fade fast or it might take a break, as most roses seem to do aorund here, it is by far the healthiest looking of all my roses, in partial shade in summer and although diminutive, providing just one place of green when other roses and plants start shedding their leaves and looking desperate in the ghostly months of late summer.

First planted October 2007.