New Roses, Bright Future

'South Africa'

As this blog entry is being posted on the evening of 5/19/14, you might just try to picture me out in my garden planting this rose, 'South Africa', because that's where I'm going to be.  Last Thursday, just before Mrs. ProfessorRoush and I left for a three-day weekend trip to visit my son in Colorado, this rose and a few others arrived,  leaving me with the choice of planting new roses out into a predicted two nights of mid-30's temperatures and possible frost, or of placing them on the kitchen table in front of a bright window and hoping they would survive indoors for a few days without me.  Survive indoors, they did.

It's nice when own-root, new roses are already blooming as they arrive, and I was especially excited to see these blooms from 'South Africa', a W. Kordes & Sons floribunda introduced in 2001.  Although the spectacular color of this rose is not in question, everything else about it seems to be up in the air.  The British label it a Floribunda, the American Rose Society calls it a Grandiflora, and it is introduced in South Africa as a Hybrid Tea.  It was introduced by Kordes as 'Golden Beauty', and also carries the registration name of KORberbeni, but I've found other references that say that Kordes et alnever registered the rose.  It won the Gold Standard Rose Trials Gold Standard award in Britain in 2009, and the Golden Price of the City of Glasgow in 2006, so it has a pretty decent following across the pond. 

For the life of me, I can't find anything about why the rose is marketed as 'South Africa' here.  'Golden Beauty' seems intuitive, but there is no explanation that I can find for renaming it as 'South Africa'.  The Kordes & Sons website doesn't even list the rose anymore, on either the German or English versions of the site, and that seems a little odd too.  So, if anyone knows more, please enlighten me.

In the meantime, I've got this one and eight more roses from www.rosesunlimitedownroot.com to plant tonight.  Of the remaining, all are Griffith Buck roses except for 'Edith de Murat', an 1858-era Bourbon.   I couldn't resist another sweet-scented Bourbon.