Rose 'Rhapsody in Blue' – The Revolutionary Purple-Blue Modern Shrub
A groundbreaking modern shrub rose that creates the closest approach to a true blue rose ever achieved, bred by the innovative English breeder Frank Cowlishaw. This exceptional variety produces stunning, semi-double blooms in the most remarkable deep purple-magenta tones that fade to slate-blue and mauve-grey. Winner of Rose of the Year 2003 and RHS Award of Garden Merit, 'Rhapsody in Blue' represents a breakthrough in rose breeding, making it perfect for gardeners who appreciate revolutionary colour combined with outstanding fragrance and garden performance.
Headlines
- Plant Type: Hardy deciduous modern shrub rose
- Eventual Height: 1.6m
- Eventual Spread: 80cm
- Flowering Period: July to September
- Flower Colour: Deep purple-magenta fading to slate-blue and mauve-grey
- Hardiness: Hardy in the UK down to temperatures of -20 to -15 degrees Celcius (RHS hardiness rating H6)
- Growth Habit: Vigorous, upright, bushy shrub
- Foliage: Mid to bright green, glossy, disease-resistant leaves
- Fragrance: Very fragrant with strong orange and fruity-floral scent
- Position: Full sun preferred
- Soil Requirements: Rich, fertile, well-drained soil with adequate moisture
Overview
Rose 'Rhapsody in Blue' stands as almost certainly the closest yet to a blue rose, with sweetly fragrant, semi-double flowers of deep purple-magenta fading to slate mauve. This exceptional variety combines revolutionary colour with reliable modern garden performance, creating a rose that truly captures the essence of innovation and sophistication. The completely unique shade of blueish purple blooms and wonderful perfume make it an ideal choice for gardeners seeking a rose that provides both stunning garden presence and exceptional cut flower performance.
Spectacular Flower Characteristics
The defining beauty of 'Rhapsody in Blue' lies in its very fragrant, cupped, semi-double (16 petals), iridescent purple flowers fading to mauve-gray. These purple-violet flowers have a diameter of 5-6 cm (3-4 inches) with 12-15 petals and are borne in clusters. Being in the shape of a bud, the flower has the shape of a cone, and after dissolution takes the shape of a flat bowl, opening fully to reveal a pure white centre with bright golden stamens.
The large, loosely double, deep purple blooms gently darken to slate-blue as they mature, creating a constantly changing display of colour. As each bloom ages, the ashy grey tones of the flowers' petals become more prominent, adding to the rose's unique character. The odd petal is streaked with white, creating additional visual interest with the central boss of yellow stamens.
Exceptional Fragrance
One of 'Rhapsody in Blue's' most celebrated features is its rich, strong orange fragrance and striking orange perfumed scent. This delicious, fruity-floral scent and heavenly apple-like aroma creates an olfactory experience unlike any other rose. With a fragrance rating of 5-6 on a scale of 1-10, this strong perfume enhances the rose's appeal for positions near seating areas, pathways, or windows where the extraordinary scent can be fully appreciated.
Outstanding Garden Performance
'Rhapsody in Blue' demonstrates good disease resistance and is a vigorous, easy-to-grow variety with a bushy, upright habit. The healthy, finely-toothed, glossy bright green to mid green deciduous leaves provide the perfect backdrop for the extraordinary purple-blue blooms. This robust, attractive foliage remains appealing throughout the growing season, ensuring year-round garden structure and appeal.
The rose exhibits a bushy growth habit with upright stems, creating a lush appearance. This vigorous, upright, continual blooming plant maintains excellent health with minimal intervention, making it perfect for gardeners seeking both beauty and practicality.
Continuous Flowering Performance
As a repeat-flowering rose, 'Rhapsody in Blue' provides blooms in summer and autumn, with repeat flowering from July to October, ensuring months of revolutionary colour. This continual blooming plant produces vigorous displays throughout the extended flowering season.
The blooms grow in clusters against a bed of rich green foliage, creating substantial visual impact and producing generous quantities of high-quality blooms, making it excellent for both garden display and cut flower arrangements.
Growing Conditions and Care
'Rhapsody in Blue' is best grown in full sun in rich, fertile soils with adequate moisture and good drainage. Growing conditions play a significant role in the overall dimensions of the plant, with variations in sunlight, soil nutrients, and moisture levels affecting performance.
For best flowering, apply a balanced fertiliser and mulch. Standard rose care practices apply: regular watering during dry periods and pruning in late winter to maintain shape and encourage vigorous new growth.
Versatile Garden Applications
With its compact size making it an excellent choice for both small gardens and larger landscapes, 'Rhapsody in Blue' offers exceptional versatility for various garden situations. This tall shrub rose produces clusters of rather glamorous, semi-double mauve flowers, making it ideal for specimen planting where its revolutionary colour can be fully appreciated.
The unique purple-blue tones work beautifully in mixed borders where the extraordinary flowers and exceptional fragrance provide sophisticated focal points. The strong stems and unusual colour make it particularly valuable for floral arrangements where the breakthrough colouring creates dramatic impact.
Award-Winning Excellence
'Rhapsody in Blue' has received the RHS Award of Garden Merit and was Rose of the Year 2003, placing it among the elite of modern roses. Winner of the prestigious Award of Garden Merit of the Royal Horticultural Society, this recognition reflects the variety's exceptional combination of breakthrough colour, performance, and garden worthiness as judged by industry experts.
Revolutionary Breeding Achievement
'Rhapsody in Blue' was bred by Frank Cowlishaw and released in 2003, representing a significant breakthrough in rose breeding. This cultivar is a seedling of the climbing rose variety 'Summer Wine', with its name deriving from its purple but nearly blue coloration. This striking variety is the closest the world has seen to a blue rose.
Container Growing Potential
With its manageable size and upright growth habit, 'Rhapsody in Blue' performs well in larger containers, making it suitable for patios, terraces, and urban gardens where space might be limited. The revolutionary colour brings dramatic impact to container displays, creating focal points that are simply unmatched by traditional rose colours.
Container-grown plants will require more regular watering and feeding but reward with the same extraordinary purple-blue blooms and exceptional fragrance as garden-planted specimens.
Seasonal Interest and Maintenance
'Rhapsody in Blue' provides substantial seasonal interest beginning with healthy, disease-resistant foliage emerging in spring, followed by the spectacular colour-changing blooms that continue through summer and autumn. The vigorous, bushy growth maintains an attractive form throughout the season, providing structure even between flowering periods.
Hardy in all of UK and northern Europe, the plant can possibly withstand temperatures down to -20°C (-4°F), ensuring reliable performance year after year.
Companion Planting
The revolutionary purple-blue blooms of 'Rhapsody in Blue' work beautifully with a wide range of companion plants. The unique purple, magenta and slate-blue tones complement many colour schemes, making them particularly valuable for sophisticated garden designs. They work exceptionally well with silver foliage plants like artemisia or lamb's ear, creating striking contrasts that enhance the unusual colouring.
For harmonious combinations, pair with other purple perennials like lavender, catmint, or salvia that complement the extraordinary tones whilst maintaining similar flowering periods. White or cream roses make excellent companions, allowing the purple-blue blooms to provide dramatic contrast whilst creating sophisticated colour schemes.
Why Choose Rose 'Rhapsody in Blue'?
Rose 'Rhapsody in Blue' represents the perfect choice for gardeners seeking a truly revolutionary rose that delivers both breakthrough colour and exceptional garden performance. Its award-winning status, unique purple-blue blooms, extraordinary fragrance, and excellent disease resistance combine to create a variety that's both breathtakingly innovative and remarkably practical.
Whether you're an experienced rose enthusiast seeking the world's closest approach to a blue rose or a passionate gardener wanting a rose that provides months of unprecedented colour and exceptional fragrance, 'Rhapsody in Blue' delivers outstanding results. Its combination of revolutionary purple-blue flowers, extraordinary orange fragrance, vigorous growth, and award-winning pedigree makes it an investment in years of garden wonder and a rose that truly embodies horticultural innovation.
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
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