Rose 'Trumpeter' - Floribunda Rose (Also known as 'Mactru')
A spectacular award-winning compact floribunda rose that produces abundant large clusters of fully double, cupped blooms in bright vermilion red with exceptional disease resistance, vigorous repeat flowering, and dwarf bushy growth habit, making it perfect for borders, hedges, containers, and mass plantings.
Headlines
- Plant Type: Hardy deciduous floribunda rose
- Eventual Height: 80cm (3ft)
- Eventual Spread: 60cm
- Flowering Period: June to October
- Flower Colour: Bright vermilion red to orange-scarlet
- Hardiness: Hardy in the UK down to temperatures of -20 to -15 degrees Celsius (RHS hardiness rating H6)
- Growth Habit: Extremely compact, dwarf, bushy and well-branched
- Flower Type: Fully double, cupped blooms with 35-45 ruffled petals
- Fragrance: Light, pleasant fragrance
- Awards: RHS Award of Garden Merit
Overview
Rose 'Trumpeter' stands as one of the most celebrated compact floribunda roses, holding the prestigious RHS Award of Garden Merit for its exceptional garden performance and outstanding visual impact. Created by legendary rose breeder Sam McGredy in 1977, this remarkable variety produces magnificent large clusters of bright vermilion red to orange-scarlet blooms that create truly spectacular displays throughout the growing season. Each fully double flower showcases 35-45 gently ruffled petals in cupped form, measuring up to 6cm across, creating substantial visual impact despite the plant's compact stature. With its extremely compact dwarf growth reaching only 80cm in height, exceptional disease resistance, vigorous repeat flowering from late spring to autumn, and light fragrance, 'Trumpeter' represents one of the finest examples of compact floribunda breeding for gardeners seeking maximum impact from minimal space with reliable, low-maintenance performance.
Key Features
The outstanding appeal of 'Trumpeter' lies in its remarkable ability to produce large clusters of bright vermilion red blooms with distinctive fully double, cupped form that creates an intense display of colour throughout the growing season. Each flower displays beautifully structured formation with 35-45 gently ruffled petals measuring up to 6cm across, providing excellent substance and weather resistance. The flowers are produced in abundant large clusters that create substantial visual impact, with the masses of blooms creating spectacular displays against the glossy, mid-green to deep green foliage. The fully double, cupped form combines classic rose elegance with modern compact garden performance, whilst the light fragrance provides pleasant garden ambience. The exceptional flowering abundance ensures this dwarf rose delivers dramatic impact despite its compact size, making it particularly suitable for situations where maximum colour impact is required from a manageable, space-efficient plant.
Growth Characteristics
This floribunda rose displays a naturally extremely compact, dwarf and bushy growth habit that makes it exceptionally suitable for diverse garden applications and contemporary landscaping schemes. The small rounded shrub nature with well-branched structure ensures reliable flowering whilst maintaining an attractive, highly manageable form perfect for front-of-border plantings, containers, and formal displays. The compact dwarf growth habit makes it ideal for smaller gardens, mass plantings, hedge applications, and areas where consistent low height with substantial flowering is important. The bushy, well-branched structure provides excellent support for the abundant flower clusters, making this variety particularly suitable for situations where reliable compact performance is essential.
Flowering Performance
From late spring through to autumn, 'Trumpeter' delivers an exceptional flowering display that continues consistently throughout the extended growing season. The plant produces magnificent fully double blooms held in large clusters, creating substantial visual impact with vigorous repeat flowering that brightens garden spaces for months on end. The flowers showcase bright vermilion red to orange-scarlet colouring that maintains excellent colour retention and weather resistance, creating ongoing visual interest and vibrant elegance. The vigorous repeat-flowering nature ensures continuous colour throughout the growing season, with the large clusters of blooms providing spectacular displays that capture attention with their intense red tones and reliable performance. The extended flowering period makes this rose invaluable for maintaining consistent garden interest and vibrant colour from late spring through to late autumn.
Growing Conditions
'Trumpeter' thrives in full sun positions with fertile, moist yet well-drained soil, requiring at least 6 hours of direct sunlight daily for optimal flowering performance and colour development. The rose adapts well to various soil types including clay providing adequate drainage is maintained, and benefits from incorporation of well-rotted organic matter and bonemeal when planting to encourage strong root development. For best results, plant in fertile, well-drained soil that has been improved with organic matter, ensuring consistent moisture throughout the growing season. The rose benefits from good air circulation around the foliage and performs well in various exposures. This adaptable variety succeeds in a wide range of garden situations whilst maintaining its exceptional flowering performance and compact habit.
Hardiness and Disease Resistance
This rose demonstrates exceptional hardiness suitable for growing throughout the UK, being fully hardy and showing excellent tolerance of typical British weather conditions. One of the most notable features of 'Trumpeter' is its exceptional disease resistance, which significantly reduces maintenance requirements and ensures healthy growth throughout the season. The healthy, glossy, mid-green to deep green foliage remains attractive and vigorous, with outstanding natural resistance to common rose diseases. This exceptional disease resistance combined with heat and rain tolerance makes it an excellent choice for organic gardening approaches and eliminates the need for chemical interventions, making it particularly suitable for busy gardeners seeking low-maintenance excellence with dramatic visual impact.
Care and Maintenance
'Trumpeter' requires minimal maintenance to maintain optimal health and flowering performance, making it ideal for busy gardeners and diverse garden settings. Apply a balanced rose fertiliser and mulch in late winter or early spring, followed by another application of fertiliser in early summer to support continuous flowering. Regular watering during dry periods, particularly in the first year after planting, helps establish strong root systems. The exceptional disease resistance and vigorous nature means this variety requires minimal intervention, making it an exceptionally easy-care option. Regular deadheading encourages continued flowering and maintains the spectacular display, whilst annual pruning in late winter maintains the compact shape and promotes vigorous new growth for optimal flowering performance.
Garden Applications
'Trumpeter' excels in contemporary and traditional garden settings where its continuous bright red flowering provides exceptional versatility and dramatic impact from a compact plant. The extremely compact dwarf growth habit makes it ideal for front-of-border plantings, mass displays, hedge applications, and formal gardens where its reliable performance and space efficiency can be appreciated. The bright vermilion red to orange-scarlet flowers suit both modern and traditional garden settings perfectly, creating vibrant displays that provide stunning focal points and complement various colour schemes. The rose works beautifully as a flowering hedge, creating impressive linear displays that provide months of continuous intense colour. The compact size and exceptional reliability make it particularly suitable for entrance plantings, foundation gardens, and anywhere consistent dramatic colour is required from a low-growing, manageable plant.
Container Growing
The extremely compact growth habit and exceptional disease resistance make 'Trumpeter' exceptionally well-suited to container cultivation for patios, balconies, and small gardens. The rose thrives in containers on terraces and areas where space is limited, making it perfect for urban gardening applications and patio displays where its light fragrance and compact beauty can be fully appreciated. Choose a container at least 40cm wide and deep with adequate drainage holes, and use high-quality multipurpose compost enriched with slow-release fertiliser. Container-grown specimens require more frequent watering and feeding than those planted in the ground, but the compact habit means they remain highly manageable whilst delivering exceptional flowering performance and vibrant colour throughout the season.
Seasonal Interest
Throughout the growing season, 'Trumpeter' provides continuous interest that evolves beautifully with the months. Spring brings the emergence of fresh, healthy, glossy, mid-green foliage and the first flower buds, building anticipation for the main flowering display. The exceptional flowering season from late spring to autumn ensures months of bright vermilion red colour, with the large clusters of blooms creating spectacular displays that showcase remarkable consistency and weather resistance. The healthy foliage remains attractive throughout the season, providing an excellent backdrop for the spectacular flower displays. Even in winter, the compact branching structure provides architectural interest whilst promising another year of spectacular flowering and award-winning performance.
Fragrance Profile
'Trumpeter' features a light, pleasant fragrance that provides charming garden ambience whilst allowing the spectacular visual display to take centre stage. The light fragrance enhances the garden experience whilst remaining subtle enough to complement other fragrant plants and suit those who prefer gentle aromatic experiences. This makes it particularly suitable for mixed plantings and areas where the focus is on dramatic colour impact with complementary aromatic appeal. The pleasant scent adds to the overall garden charm whilst ensuring the rose remains accessible to fragrance-sensitive gardeners.
Heritage and Breeding Excellence
Bred by the legendary Sam McGredy in 1977 with the cultivar name 'Mactru', 'Trumpeter' represents the exceptional breeding excellence of one of the world's greatest rose breeders. McGredy, who produced around 270 rose varieties, created this outstanding compact floribunda that successfully combines dramatic flowering impact with manageable proportions and exceptional garden reliability. The variety demonstrates innovative breeding that integrated dwarf characteristics with outstanding garden performance, creating a rose that satisfies contemporary gardening needs for maximum impact from minimal space. This breeding excellence brings unique characteristics including exceptional compactness, remarkable disease resistance, and outstanding flowering abundance that sets this variety apart from traditional floribunda roses.
Companion Planting
The bright vermilion red to orange-scarlet colours of 'Trumpeter' provide exceptional opportunities for companion planting with a wide range of garden plants and striking colour schemes. The intense red blooms work beautifully with white and cream flowers, creating dramatic, high-contrast displays that highlight both plants. The rose pairs exceptionally well with silver and grey foliage plants, creating sophisticated combinations that enhance the red colour intensity. Blue and purple flowers create stunning complementary displays, whilst yellow flowers provide vibrant, energetic combinations. The compact habit makes it particularly suitable for planting with herbs, perennials, and other low-growing plants, creating layered gardens that provide continuous interest and dramatic impact throughout the growing season.
Award Recognition and Garden Merit
'Trumpeter' holds the prestigious RHS Award of Garden Merit, confirming its exceptional garden performance, outstanding reliability, and remarkable visual impact despite its compact stature. This recognition reflects superior performance in diverse growing conditions and demonstrates the successful combination of dramatic flowering with compact garden proportions. The RHS Award of Garden Merit is given only to roses that demonstrate excellent performance and reliability in garden conditions, marking this variety as one of exceptional merit that combines stunning beauty with outstanding compact garden performance and disease resistance.
Mass Planting Excellence
One of the most appreciated features of 'Trumpeter' is its exceptional suitability for mass plantings, where its compact habit and abundant flowering create spectacular displays of continuous colour. This characteristic makes the rose particularly suitable for large-scale landscaping applications where consistent low height combined with dramatic colour impact is required. The mass planting excellence ensures maximum visual impact from horizontal space whilst maintaining manageable proportions and minimal maintenance requirements.
Hedge Application Success
The exceptional flowering abundance and compact growth habit of 'Trumpeter' make it particularly valuable for flowering hedge applications, providing continuous colour barriers that remain manageable in height whilst delivering spectacular visual impact. This remarkable characteristic provides ongoing hedge interest and ensures reliable flowering performance in linear plantings. The hedge suitability makes it particularly valuable for situations where flowering boundaries with consistent low height are required.
Why Choose 'Trumpeter'?
Rose 'Trumpeter' represents the perfect combination of compact excellence, award-winning reliability, and outstanding dramatic beauty. The large clusters of bright vermilion red fully double blooms provide continuous flowering displays from late spring through to autumn, whilst the exceptional disease resistance ensures healthy growth with minimal maintenance. The extremely compact dwarf growth habit makes it suitable for gardens of all sizes, from front-of-border plantings to hedge applications and container cultivation. Whether grown for its spectacular abundant red blooms, space-efficient compact habit, or as an RHS Award of Garden Merit winner bred by legendary Sam McGredy, this outstanding floribunda rose offers exceptional value that will provide years of gardening pleasure and dependable dramatic colour impact in any garden setting.
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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