Rose 'Story Teller' – The Charming Tall Floribunda
Rose 'Story Teller' stands as a delightful floribunda variety that brings both beauty and narrative charm to the garden. This tall, healthy floribunda produces clusters of pretty, very pale apricot flowers that gracefully fade to cream shades as they age, creating a constantly evolving display of subtle colours. With its sweet rose fragrance, open-centred flower form, and excellent repeat flowering performance, 'Story Teller' represents the perfect combination of classic floribunda reliability and enchanting garden presence, making it ideal for gardeners who appreciate roses with both visual appeal and delightful scent.
Headlines:
- Type: Hardy floribunda rose
- Eventual Height: 1.6m
- Eventual Spread: 80cm
- Flowering: June to October
- Hardiness: Hardy in the UK down to temperatures of -20 to -15 degrees Celcius (RHS hardiness rating H6)
- Growth Habit: Tall, healthy, upright growth
- Colour: Very pale apricot fading to cream shades
- Form: Open-centred, cluster flowering
- Fragrance: Sweet rose fragrance
- Season: Excellent repeat flowering performance
Charming Flowers
The defining beauty of 'Story Teller' lies in its pretty, open-centred flowers that showcase the classic floribunda cluster-flowering habit. These very pale apricot blooms create a soft, romantic display that evolves throughout each flower's lifecycle as they gracefully fade to cream shades with age. This colour transition adds depth and visual interest, with each cluster displaying flowers at different stages of development.
The open-centred form of the flowers creates an informal, cottage garden appeal that differs from the high-centred hybrid tea form, making them particularly attractive to pollinating insects. The flowers are produced in generous clusters, creating substantial impact whilst maintaining the delicate, refined appearance that makes this variety so appealing.
Sweet Fragrance
'Story Teller' offers a delightful sweet rose fragrance that enhances its appeal as both a garden rose and cut flower variety. The classic rose scent provides an olfactory experience that complements the visual beauty of the pale apricot blooms, making this rose perfect for positions where both sight and scent can be appreciated, such as near pathways, seating areas, or mixed borders.
Excellent Garden Performance
This healthy floribunda demonstrates good disease resistance and maintains attractive foliage throughout the growing season. The variety is noted for its robust constitution and reliable performance, making it an excellent choice for gardeners seeking both beauty and practicality in their rose selection.
'Story Teller' exhibits tall growth that makes it quite distinctive among floribunda varieties, creating an upright presence that adds structure and height to garden displays. This vigorous variety is known for its easy-care nature and consistent performance, making it perfect for gardeners of all experience levels.
Outstanding Repeat Flowering
As a repeat-flowering floribunda, 'Story Teller' provides good repeat flowering throughout the growing season, ensuring continuous colour and fragrance from summer into autumn. The variety is noted for its reliable flowering performance, producing fresh clusters of blooms when properly maintained through regular deadheading and appropriate care.
Growing Requirements
- Position: Sunny, open position for best flowering performance
- Soil: Well-drained, fertile soil with good organic content
- Care: Standard floribunda care applies - regular watering during dry periods, annual feeding with balanced fertiliser, and annual pruning to maintain shape and encourage vigorous new growth. Regular deadheading encourages continued cluster production throughout the season.
The healthy nature and good disease resistance make this variety particularly suitable for various growing conditions, adapting well to different garden situations whilst maintaining consistent performance.
Garden Uses
'Story Teller' offers exceptional versatility for various garden applications:
- Mid to Back Border Planting: The tall growth habit makes it perfect for providing height and structure in mixed borders
- Hedge Formation: Can be used to create small, neat hedges with continuous flowering interest
- Mixed Cottage Gardens: The informal flower form and soft colours complement cottage garden plantings
- Cut Flower Gardens: Cluster-flowering habit provides excellent material for arrangements
- Pollinator Gardens: Open-centred flowers attract beneficial insects and bees
- Narrative Gardens: Perfect for themed gardens that tell stories through plant selection
Border Excellence
With its quite tall growth habit for a floribunda, 'Story Teller' excels in mid to back border positions where its height can be fully appreciated. The neat growth habit ensures it doesn't overwhelm neighbouring plants whilst providing substantial presence and continuous flowering interest throughout the season.
The variety's ability to function as a small hedge makes it particularly valuable for creating garden rooms or defining spaces whilst providing months of pale apricot blooms and sweet fragrance.
Companion Planting
The very pale apricot to cream colours of 'Story Teller' work beautifully with a wide range of companion plants. The soft, subtle tones complement purple and blue perennials, creating gentle contrast, whilst harmonising perfectly with other pastel-coloured roses and perennials in similar soft shades.
The open-centred flowers and pollinator-friendly nature make it an excellent companion for other wildlife-friendly plants, contributing to a garden ecosystem that supports beneficial insects whilst providing beautiful displays.
Seasonal Interest and Wildlife Value
'Story Teller' provides substantial seasonal interest with its continuous flowering performance and evolving colour display. The open-centred flowers are particularly valuable for pollinating insects, making this variety an excellent choice for gardeners interested in supporting local wildlife whilst enjoying beautiful roses.
The sweet fragrance and cluster-flowering habit ensure the rose provides both visual and olfactory interest throughout the growing season, creating a garden feature that engages multiple senses.
Care and Maintenance
'Story Teller' requires standard floribunda care with regular watering during dry periods and annual feeding with balanced fertiliser. The healthy nature and good disease resistance mean minimal intervention is required for pest and disease management, making it suitable for gardeners seeking reliable, low-maintenance roses.
Regular deadheading of spent flower clusters encourages continued blooming throughout the season, whilst annual pruning maintains the neat form and encourages vigorous new growth for the following year.
Perfect for Storytelling Gardens
True to its evocative name, 'Story Teller' makes an excellent choice for themed gardens that aim to create narrative through plant selection. Whether used in literary gardens, memorial plantings, or spaces designed to inspire contemplation and reflection, this rose provides the perfect combination of beauty, fragrance, and symbolic meaning.
Why Choose 'Story Teller'?
Rose 'Story Teller' represents the perfect choice for gardeners seeking a floribunda rose that combines reliable performance with subtle beauty and sweet fragrance. Its combination of pale apricot blooms that fade to cream, tall growth habit, excellent repeat flowering, and healthy constitution makes it both a beautiful garden feature and practical growing choice.
Whether you're creating mixed borders, establishing hedging, or developing a garden with narrative themes, 'Story Teller' delivers outstanding results. Its reliable flowering, easy-care nature, and pollinator-friendly characteristics make it an excellent investment for gardeners who appreciate roses that combine understated elegance with consistent garden performance and ecological value.
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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