Damask Roses

If you only have one rose in your garden, it should be a Damask.

Another notable descendant of the old cabbage rose, the Damask is the complete package: exquisite fragrance, spectacular flowers, perpetual bloom, well-behaved growth habit and disease resistance.

Whenever fragrance is described as a pure rose scent, it refers to the smell of the damasks, which is sultry and saturated and has hints of garden pinks and cloves. Theirs is the variety used to make the coveted attar of roses.

It's hard to pick which cultivar is the best, so I put together a list of much-appreciated Damask roses and their best features.

Leda - the beauty in the picture, has painted flowers. Words don't do them justice, so I'll let the image speak for itself. It is lightly fragrant, nowhere near the average for its kin, but who cares about scent when it looks like this?

Ispahan - with clear pink blossoms, fully double and very fragrant. Possibly of Persian descent. Used to make perfume.

Mme Hardy - one of the popular Damasks, with clusters of tightly packed white rosettes and a clean citrus scent.

The Four Season rose, or the Autumn Damask - has large pink flowers, it's intensely fragrant and blooms all summer long.

Damasks require very little care. Just prune the damaged canes in spring and feed them a couple of times in the summer. Strange as this sounds, roses are the ultimate low maintenance plants. Well, some of them are.