Rosa primula has scented leaves?

COOL!

What do they smell like? (I know - that can be a difficult question to answer.)

If you grow Primula on its own roots, does it sucker?

Please check out this picture from HMF's Primula photo gallery. Can Primula's thorns really be this nasty, or do you think the photo's more likely to be something like Rosa sericea?

um well, yep, R.Primula does have fairly vicious thorns and can be very brittle. The leaves are supposed to smell of incense but I can never catch a whiff of it. Even so, this is the first rose to flower in the UK and is such a wonderful harbinger of spring, I would not be without it.
York rose - have to agree with you that those thorns look awfully close together and much redder than the ones on my R.primula. Will go along with Olga too - these roses are too beautiful and once you start getting into them you are in for a treat - R.earldomensis, the Dunwich rose, various scottish burnet roses, pimpinellifolias, R.ecae....all gorgeous.

Leave have a strong wafting scent for me. You really can't just put your nose to the leaf and smell, it will not work. But when you pass the bush or work in this part of garden, especially when it is very humid (almost always here :( in summer) you get this fragrance. It is quite strong and I love it, not sweet, more bitter to me, , but I can't describe smells well.
Thorns are different for me. Onr the second picture you can see a thorn. It is big, but there are not too many of them as at HMF picture and they never red for me. I would say chocolate brown.
Olga
Olga

Thank you both. I suspected the picture wasn't right.

I wouldn't rush to the conclusion that Margot Schowalter's photo of R. primula's prickles is incorrect. The description of the prickles in Flora of China is:
"sparse to numerous, paired below some leaves, frequently opposite elsewhere, straight, to 1.5 cm, stout, flat, gradually tapering to a broad elliptic base, small prickles and bristles absent." Rehder described the prickles as "numerous stout wide-based straight prickles."

In 1977, botanist A. V. Roberts published a detailed comparison of Rosa ecae and Rosa primula. Based on 97% morphological similarities, on cross-fertility, and on geographical distribution, he concluded that they comprise a single species with two subspecies, of which R. ecae ssp. primula is one. According to Robert, the key distinguishing characteristic of the species is red canes: "The red colour of the main stems and branches of R. primula and R. ecae can be distinguished, even on herbarium sheets, from the dull brown color of the other species investigated [R. hugonis, xanthina, foetida, hemisphaerica, spinosissima]. Sharing 97% of morphological characteristics, R. primula and ecae are supposedly distinguishable primarily by their leaflet counts, with Primula having more (tho the numbers overlap at 7 and 9), by, some say, their hip color and by their geographic distribution. Their natural habitat is a large area east of the Caspian Sea.

The prickles in the picture match descriptions of the prickles and leaflet, and the cane is red. I have R. primula as sold by one Canadian nursery, and the prickles definitely resemble those in Margot's picture. No foliage yet.

Ah! Thank you for the updated info.

Olga--your pictures are lovely----

Florence

I have several rosa xanthina and their canes are red, too. R. primula looks similar to it but the flowers look way bigger in your pictures. Xanthina has really sweet red hips. They taste like a crabapple.

Here is a link that might be useful: Rosa xanthina

I planted several different varieties of these early yellows, and I'm very excited about them. They seem to be taking off nicely.

I also planted Harrison's Yellow about 5 years ago, but it is still a tiny twiglet. I wonder what's wrong with this.

Harrison Yellow was never good for me here. Other early yellows are very heathy in my garden, no spec of BS, but HY blackspotted easily. Also other yellows have very graceful bush shape and HY was not attractive bush here. It left my garden :(
Olga

Thank you all for the source info and comments. This'll warn me not to put it right by a path! Best, GW

Olga (or anyone else with experience with this rose for that matter), would you recommend R. primula for a foundation planting (where one could use a 6-8' tall shrub)? Is R. primula's shrub form sufficiently beautiful for it to work as a foundation shrub? Is the shrub's architecture vase-shaped, or more "brambly" (the way R. eglanteria is clearly a bramble)?

(The townhouse it would be planted next to has an exposed 4' high concrete basement wall and for two stories above that is covered in wood siding painted brick red (not a particularly orange brick red either; more brown-red).)

The rose would get sun from mid-late morning through most of the afternoon (being shaded by an adjacent lilac in the early & mid morning).

It's a terrible picture, but hopefully better than nothing. You can get a rough idea of the shrub shape.

{{gwi:241618}}

This is a fairly young plant, grafted from Pickering.

I assume it will eventually look more like this.
{{gwi:241619}}

This is R. hugonis, own-root and well established. It's definitely worth planting so long as there is enough room for it. Around here, the landscapers discovered it about 15 years ago, but tried to shoehorn it into hybrid tea sized slots.

My Primula has long arching at the ends canes, quite graceful and different from my Hugonis. However my hugois is own root and Primula is grafted, probably this is the reason for shape differences. My hugois is shrubby, but Primula has more what I would decribe as big Alba form
(kind of similar to Big Semiplena, but even more upright)
Olga

Thank you both!

I have been wanting to plant a R. primula for years...only one nursery in the US currently lists it (Greenmantle), but they don't list it as available...any other suggestions?

Thanks, Sunny

I would call GM to be sure it's not available, but according to HMF, two other US nurseries list R. primula: RVR and Paradise Gardens Rare Plants Nursery. Browsing the web site of the latter company, I encountered something I hadn't heard of... rose-scented thyme.

There may be other nurseries that don't sell many roses that are not listed at HMF.

Good luck,

Virginia

Virginia beat me to it. I stumbled across the three roses listed by Paradise Gardens Rare Plants Nursery while looking for other things, and I made mention of it here. It took some searching to remember the name, since I can't access my old computer's files at the moment, and I came back here to post it.

:-)

~Christopher

So, Christopher, how do your gardens grow?

I'm hoping for updates on your own garden, of course, but also a thread on the church garden when you have a bit of time.

Virginia

fyi: the only available source for North America that is in current production is Hortico (Canada). Over in England, lots of nurseries sell this species -- including David Austin (UK)!.