Roses that are Classified as Tea Roses
They really do smell like green tea. It was a very pleasant day early in June when I wandered into my back yard. I smelled a delicious tea like scent which I had never detected before. I tracked it down to a rose some thirty feet away that I had planted eight weeks earlier that spring. It was the climbing tea rose, Sombreuil, pictured to the right. Never since has the rose produced such a pungent scent, but I am much enamored of it anyway.
Tea roses descend from Rosa gigantea, Park's Tea Scented China, and old European roses. They tend to be quite sensitive to cold, needing bright sun and warmth in both summer and winter to thrive. Austin complains that their bright colors are garish. And if one is creating a kind of ideal British style cottage garden it might be hard to work with them. But there are a lot of places in the US where the sky is bluer, and the sun hotter and brighter where brightly colored roses look more naturally at home.