Rose 'Abracadabra' – The Magical Striped Floribunda with Ever-Changing Beauty
Rose 'Abracadabra' stands as one of the most extraordinary and captivating floribunda roses available, earning its reputation as the ultimate choice for gardeners who prize unique beauty and magical garden presence. This exceptional variety produces large, semi-double to double blooms in striking marbled patterns of deep red, burgundy, yellow, and white stripes that create an ever-changing spectacle. With its dramatic striped coloration, reliable repeat flowering performance, and excellent disease resistance, 'Abracadabra' represents the perfect choice for gardeners seeking something truly spectacular and unforgettable.
Headlines
- Type: Hardy floribunda rose
- General Height: 75-90cm (0.9m)
- General Spread: 50cm (0.5m)
- Flowering: May to September
- Hardiness: Hardy in the UK down to temperatures of -20 to -15 degrees Celcius (RHS hardiness rating H6)
- Growth Habit: Bushy-upright, deciduous shrub
- Colour: Marbled blooms with deep red-burgundy base and yellow-white stripes
- Form: Semi-double to double blooms in clusters of up to 7 per truss
- Size: 7-8cm diameter blooms
- Petals: Semi-double to double formation
- Fragrance: Delicately scented with subtle fragrance
Spectacular Flowers
The defining magic of 'Abracadabra' lies in its extraordinary marbled blooms that showcase nature's artistry at its most dramatic. These magnificent 7-8cm flowers display striking patterns with deep red-burgundy backgrounds enhanced by bright yellow and white stripes, creating a mesmerising effect that ensures no two blooms are ever identical.
The semi-double to double blooms form in clusters of up to 7 per truss, typical of floribundas, ensuring a consistent and abundant display throughout the flowering season. Each flower exemplifies unique beauty with its unpredictable striped patterns, making them exceptional conversation pieces for both garden display and prestigious cut flower arrangements.
Delicate Fragrance
'Abracadabra' offers a delicate, subtle fragrance that perfectly complements its spectacular visual impact. This gentle scent adds an extra dimension to the already extraordinary garden presence without overwhelming the senses, making it perfect for close plantings and intimate garden spaces.
The light fragrance enhances the magical quality of this remarkable variety, making it ideal for positions where both the stunning visual display and delicate scent can be fully appreciated throughout the flowering season.
Outstanding Garden Performance
This superb floribunda demonstrates exceptional garden performance with attractive medium green, glossy foliage that provides the perfect backdrop for the dramatic striped blooms. The variety exhibits bushy-upright growth that creates a well-proportioned shrub with excellent structure throughout the growing season.
'Abracadabra' maintains very good disease resistance, particularly against scab, and shows average resistance to other main rose adversities. The robust constitution ensures reliable performance year after year, making it perfect for gardeners seeking both extraordinary beauty and dependable results with minimal intervention.
Continuous Flowering Performance
As a repeat-flowering floribunda, 'Abracadabra' provides blooms in flushes throughout summer into autumn, ensuring months of spectacular colour and magical garden presence. This extended flowering season means the rose maintains its captivating impact throughout the growing period, with regular displays of fresh striped blooms when properly maintained.
The variety flowers all summer with excellent repeat performance, producing continuous displays of the magnificent marbled blooms that make this rose so highly valued by enthusiasts seeking something truly unique.
Growing Requirements
- Position: Full sun for best flowering and disease resistance
- Soil: Fertile, humus-rich, moist but well-drained soil - will tolerate most soil types including chalky, clay, loamy, and sandy conditions
- Spacing: Allow adequate space for the upright growth habit, approximately 60cm apart
- Care: Standard floribunda care applies - regular watering during dry periods, annual feeding with balanced rose fertiliser, and annual pruning to maintain shape. Winter protection may be required in colder areas as this is a tender variety requiring winter TLC.
The adaptable nature and excellent disease resistance make this variety suitable for a wide range of growing conditions whilst maintaining outstanding performance.
Garden Uses
'Abracadabra' offers exceptional versatility for various garden applications:
- Focal Point Plantings: Perfect as a specimen plant where its unique beauty can be showcased
- Mixed Borders: Provides dramatic colour and structure in perennial plantings
- Cut Flower Gardens: Outstanding for unique and conversation-starting flower arrangements
- Container Gardens: Excellent for pots and containers where it can be easily protected in winter
- Novelty Gardens: Essential for gardens focused on unusual and striking varieties
- Gift Gardens: Makes an exceptional and memorable gift plant
- Cottage Gardens: Perfect for informal settings where its magical qualities can surprise visitors
Breeding Excellence
'Abracadabra' was bred by the renowned German rose breeder Kordes and selected in 2014, representing decades of careful breeding work to create truly unique coloration and reliable garden performance. This prestigious breeding background from Kordes, one of the world's leading rose breeders, ensures both quality and innovative characteristics.
The variety appears to be related to the miniature 'Hocus Pocus', sharing the magical striped characteristics that make these roses so captivating and unique in the garden.
Perfect for Cutting
The strong stems and large, perfectly formed blooms make 'Abracadabra' exceptional for cut flower arrangements. The long-lasting blooms combined with their unique striped patterns create arrangements that provide extraordinary visual impact and serve as perfect conversation starters, making them ideal for special occasions and indoor enjoyment.
Companion Planting
The dramatic striped blooms of 'Abracadabra' work beautifully with solid-coloured companions that allow the marbled patterns to take centre stage. Silver foliage plants enhance the colour contrast, whilst simple green foliage provides the perfect neutral backdrop. The medium green, glossy leaves add seasonal structure and complement both formal and informal garden settings.
Care and Maintenance
'Abracadabra' requires standard floribunda care with particular attention to winter protection in colder areas. The excellent disease resistance, particularly against scab, means minimal intervention is required for pest and disease management, making it suitable for gardeners seeking unique roses with reliable performance.
Regular deadheading of spent bloom clusters encourages continued flowering throughout the season, whilst annual pruning maintains the bushy-upright form and encourages vigorous new growth for optimal performance. The near-thornless nature makes maintenance easier and safer.
Why Choose 'Abracadabra'?
Rose 'Abracadabra' represents the perfect choice for gardeners seeking a truly unique and magical rose that never fails to surprise and delight. Its extraordinary marbled blooms with ever-changing striped patterns, combined with reliable flowering performance and excellent disease resistance, make it both a stunning garden feature and practical growing choice.
Whether you're creating a conversation piece in mixed borders, seeking an unforgettable cut flower variety, or wanting a rose that embodies pure magic and wonder, 'Abracadabra' delivers outstanding results. Its captivating beauty, proven performance, and unique characteristics make it an essential choice for gardeners who appreciate roses that combine horticultural excellence with truly extraordinary and unforgettable visual impact.
Reasons to Buy Roses from Jacksons Nurseries
(1) ‘Excellent’ on Trustpilot
Buy with confidence from the only online rose grower rated ‘Excellent’ 4.9* on Trustpilot. We have been a trusted supplier of roses for 3 generations. We take pride in growing our own roses in the field before potting them up, allowing for meticulous quality control to sale.
(2) Best Prices Guaranteed – Direct from the Grower
Save £££s by buying direct from a grower you can trust. We’ve already price checked all of our roses against competitors so you don’t have to. We are so confident we offer the best value, if you find a rose of the same type and grade elsewhere, we’ll beat it by 10%.
(3) 12 Month Plants Guarantee
We offer a 12 month guarantee on every plant that you buy from us that we have classified as Fully Hardy. If a plant you've bought from us fails in the first year, we will either replace it or refund you. See our satisfaction guarantee page for more details and conditions.
(4) Third generation family-owned nursery specialising in roses
Jackson’s Nurseries is a 3rd generation family owned business which has been growing roses for over 60 years. Roses have always been our specialty, as you can see from the colourful array of blooms in the background to the old family photo below. Today, we offer over 200 different varieties of floribundas, hybrid teas, patio, shrub and David Austin roses. Our roses are initially grown in the field before being potted up for website dispatch.
(5) Grown at altitude to produce strong, healthy plants
Our North Staffordshire nursery is situated at 250 metres above sea level, producing strong, hardy plants that will thrive in your garden. Our nursery sits on clay, so you can be sure our roses can handle heavy soil too.
(6) Help & Advice and Aftercare
We are help to help you with any help and advice you need in choosing, planting and growing your roses before, during and after your purchase from us. The help and advice section of our website has extensive information, see below some examples of articles you may find useful:
- Different types of roses and what they each mean
- Guide to climbing roses
- Guide to floribunda roses
- Guide to hybrid tea roses
- How to plant a climbing rose
- How to grow hybrid tea roses
How our roses are supplied through the seasons
All our roses are cultivated in an open field and are carefully dug up when the weather is optimal, typically in October or November. While other nurseries supply roses bare root, once our field-grown roses have been potted up we supply them freshly potted. This better protects the roots and helps keep them moist in transit, ensuring your roses arrive as healthy as when they left our nursery. So don’t be alarmed if the compost comes away from the roots when you remove them from the pot.
The roses can remain in their pots over the winter, as long as they are properly watered and fed, but it's best to plant them out as soon as possible. If you do plant them straight away make sure the planting mix is prepared first, hold the root close to the top of the hole as you tip the pot upside down and try to keep as much compost as possible from falling away. They will already be pruned, so no additional pruning is needed except for trimming any dead tips. Regular pruning can start in late winter, the year after planting.
Rose Types
Hybrid Tea Roses (HT)
Hybrid Tea roses are probably the most popular group of roses, available in both bush and standard form they have long flower stems and shapely blooms. Blooms are typically medium to large in size, with many petals which form a distinct central cone.
Floribunda Roses (FL)
Floribunda roses bears its flowers in clusters or trusses, with several blooms open at time in each truss. A popular choice the Floribunda rose group is unrivalled for colour, reliability and longevity as a bedding display however the flower form in generally inferior to the Hybrid Tea.
Patio Roses (PATIO)
Patio roses were introduced in the 1980’s and the group now contains several popular varieties. Generally low-growing roses that were once grouped with the Floribuna group but have now been put in their own group of compact versions. Usually growing about 50cm high they make excellent plants for patio containers or at the front of borders.
Climbing Roses (CLM)
Climbing roses as the name suggests are the perfect choice for covering a wall or screen. Often grouped together with Ramblers, Climbers tend to have stiffer stems, larger flowers but smaller trusses than Ramblers.
Rambling Roses (RAM)
Rambling roses are often grouped with Climbing Roses but the ramblers tend to have a more pliable stems that can be used to run along the soil to use as groundcover or can be used to make weeping standards.
Miniature Roses (MINI)
Miniature roses have increased in popularity in recent years due to their versatility, even grown indoors as temporary pot plants that grow to a maximum height of 40cm. An ideal choice for planting in tubs, edging beds and rockeries.
English Roses (ENG)
Often referred to as Austin or David Austin Roses, English roses are hybrids of old English roses and more modern varieties bread by David Austin to provide the best of both, mixing old rose shapes and scents with more modern colour range, compact habits and repeat flowering.
Planting Advice
Roses like a generous root space, so dig a deep hole approximately twice as wide as the current root system, preferably adding composted organic matter to the soil. Never plant into frozen soil – in winter, await a frost-free period. Carefully remove the pot and gently tease the roots apart to spread them around the hole. Position the plant so that the ‘bud point’ (the place where the shoots emerge from, where the cultivated rose was grafted onto the rootstock) is at soil level. Replace the soil, firming it down gently, then water copiously. Ideally, a general purpose fertiliser should be applied to the surrounding soil as a top dressing. We also highly recommend the use of Rose Rootgrow, which provides a friendly fungus that prevents ‘rose replant syndrome’.
Buying our Roses
Pot Size
Most of our roses are supplied in a 4 litre pot although this may vary slightly depending on rose variety. If the size of pot differes significatly from 4 litres then we will make this clear somewhere on the product page.
Seasonality
Our roses are grown outdoors and as such are subject to seasonal changes. As we sell potted stock throughout the year your rose may not arrive and look like you expect it to. If you are uncertain how your rose will arrive (especially if buying for a gift) then we suggest you contact us prior to making a purchase.
Freshly Potted
Each year a new batch of roses is potted up ready for the following season. Once potted (usually November/December time) they go on sale as 'Freshly Potted'. If you purchase a freshly potted rose and plant it soon after you will find that when removing the rose from the pot there will be a lot of loose soil as the roots will not have had time to grow and bind the compost.
Pruned/Cut Back
In autumn the majority of our roses have finished flowering and begin to look untidy, at this point we prune them quite hard in preparation for the following season. We continue to sell roses throughout the year, when a rose has been pruned in such a way we will identify it has being so. If you are not sure what to expect then please ask prior to making a purchase. Some garden centres/supermarkets sell stock that has been grown abroad or in poly-tunnels so they look 'picture perfect' out of season, while this is ideal for a gift they are short lived once planted.
Aftercare
