the lady gardener blooms a lot! She is very upright tho, but so far, more blooms than Olivia

I don't grow these in containers, but I can help with best bloomers.

St. Cecilia - new this year as a bare root on multiflora. Such a delicate pink. Blooming like crazy. Starts pink and fades to white. Became chlorotic right away, but a little iron turned her green again..

Geoff Hamilton - new this year. Bare root on multiflora. Rounded bush form. Still small. I think it will be a favorite and I plan to get another one. Good bloomer. Like most Austins, responds well to water.

Wollerton Old Hall - new bare root, grafted on Huey from Rosarium Garden Center this year. Needed iron. Was probably in it’s pot too long in the heat. Has greened up and looks healthy.

Crown Princess Margarita - great bloomer, healthy. One of my best. Will be a short climber here.

Young Lycidas - took a couple years to straighten up. Still a little floppy. Love the bloom color and scent. Older one is deep raspberry, new one is medium pink. I hope it’s just because it’s young. Great bloomer

Strawberry Hill - a lanky shrub here. Lovely blooms, sweet scent. Takes a rest between cycles.

Evelyn - one grafted on Huey, one own root. No big difference. Seem to like the conditions here. Not prolific bloomers but they do respond quickly to food and water.

Winchester Cathedral - both grafted on Huey, the one in more sun is a great bloomer. The one in too much shade needs to be moved.

St. Swithun - moderate bloomer, but love the blooms. Great fragrance.

Eglantyne - most romantic Austin in my opinion. Mine is loosely branched, but blooms well. Healthy and has a strong fragrance.

Jude the Obscure - FINALLY blooming this year. Given another reprieve. He's fussy. Best scent!!!

Tess of the d’Urbervilles - in too much shade, but still blooms quite a lot. Lanky.

Tamora - one own root, one grafted on Huey. Own root healthier. Small bushes, big blooms, good repeat and great scent.

Darcy Bussell - new this year, grafted bare root from Northland. LOVE this rose. Never stops blooming. Similar color to the other deep red Austins.

Wm. Shakespeare 2000 - gorgeous, strongly scented blooms, but lanky. Moderate bloomer. LOVE it.

Munstead Wood - one own root, one on Huey. Own root is better, bigger, bloomier, healthier. The older it gets, the bigger and better the blooms, they're huge and the bush is always covered in buds and blooms. Grafted one is in too much shade.

Golden Celebration - own root, has never been good here. The few blooms I get are very nice with good perfume. I can't get it to fill out and produce more than a handful of blooms a season. I think it's much better for everyone else.

Spirit of Freedom - one grafted, one own root. Not much difference in the two. Newer, grafted one is a bit bigger and blooms a little more. Not prolific bloomers, but they are spectacular.

Abraham Darby - own root, very bushy, good bloomer with a rest between cycles.

Royal Jubilee - grafted on Huey. 3 years old, already big bush. Good bloomer, good form.

Desdemona - grafted. One of the best in every way.

Mary Magdalene - Grafted. Black spots in this dry climate, but beautiful blooms, and great bush form. Short rest between cycles.

Country Living - a very old one that doesn’t bloom very much. Out of commerce.

Alnwick Castle - the most upright Austin I have. Sturdy canes, great for cutting. Beautiful blooms and perfume. Good repeat.

Wildeve - lanky, probably a climber in warmer zones. Good repeat. One of my best. Needs support.

Ambridge - another one that took a long time to settle in, but it’s a favorite. Upright, good form, beautiful, abundant blooms.

Austin roses do surprisingly well in my climate of very hot summers, cold winters. Rosarium Garden Center (formerly Northland) has a large section of their display gardens devoted to Austins because they seem to love this climate.

Andrea: Fantastic list of Austin, with note on own-root versus grafted. Thank you.

Great advice everyone! I'll be looking through this better when my list of Austins come from Wildwood Express...a Canadian Rose/bulb/seed, etc. that just this year started its on-line mail delivery service.

Jaime, I'm in NY too and this is my first year growing austins. The top bloomers for me are Carding Mill, and then Jubilee Celebration. They seem to always have flowers on them, and they're both beautiful and glow. Both of them are growing stronger stems now too and holding their new, even bigger flowers up better.

Olivia Austin rose has the best shape and is just behind those two, but blooms a lot and they last long on the bush.

I've been avoiding this list because every one of us has quite different rose bloom results, depending on where each of us lives. Climate, which produces disease pressure, severe or mild winter dieback, insect pests (also dependent on climate)--we are all aware of these challenges, and the difference it can make on continuous rose blooming. So, I waited until my season was winding down to assemble a "list", which is the result of observing some of my roses for decades.

Here it is, descending in order of bloom productivity, for you to take with a grain of salt:

1. Tamora has reached the point where she is in a constant flush of blooms--not just a few here and there, but one flush after another, steadily all season. Grafted on multiflora, I have grown her for about 13 years.

2. Weirdly, that picky oddball, The Prince, has become a crazy bloomer, increasing in plant size and bloom production over the last several years, after being fairly a fairly blah bloomer for for close to a decade. What has gotten this old guy going? Grafted on multiflora, I've grown him for maybe 12 years.

3. A reliable, constant bloomer, with big lovely blooms and big plant size, is Boscobel. I got this rose, grafted on Dr Huey 5 or 6 years ago.

4. Gigantic Golden Celebration is always in bloom. It's grafted on Dr Huey, and I've grown him for about 13 years.

5. Munstead wood is almost always in bloom, even in the worst of heat, displaying beauty in scent and looks. I have two MW, and they are equally good. Both are grafted on Dr Huey. One I've grown for about 7-8 years, and the other for about 4 years.

6. Not a favorite, but a goodish bloomer is Olivia, a wimp in my dry heat who always looks faded and blah. Sorry everyone.

I think that's enough for now. There are lots of good suggestions in the many posts above, and Flowers' list is especially full of helpful information. I agree with her on some of the roses we both grow. Diane

Love these lists! I'm not growing in containers, but my Austin bloomers (!) are: The Poet's Wife, almost never out of bloom; Munstead Wood; and then Carding Mill (though I'd say that one goes in flushes more than continuous). My Olivia is finally coming along and may start to live up to all the high praise lavished on her in this forum.

@strawchicago z5 - glad to know I'm not the only one disappointed in Queen of Sweden. My heart melts when she does bloom, but although healthy she almost never blooms, and the flowers have no scent. I think I'm giving up on her this year...but I feel so sad about that.

@Sheila z8a Rogue Valley OR . Gasp! Is that one QoS bush??? If so, I'll keep mine in place. I have 2 years in so far. Again, healthy, tall. Some blooms in spring, 2 blooms over the summer. But the blooms are so lovely I just can't even describe how happy they make when they DO appear...so you think I should leave it in a while longer?

@Sheila z8a Rogue Valley OR that's beautiful. Almost looks like a bunch of fireflies or xmas lights scattered over a bush in your photos thumbnail

@joeywyomingzone4 That's a beautiful flower on Queen Nefertiti, do you remember where you got yours? I can't seem to find her on any sites.

@strawchicago z5 Love all of your pictures, the flowers have such good shape and colors. Especially love your WS 2000, Wise Portia and Evelyn. Beautiful

I got Queen Nefertiti from Split Mountain Farms which is supplied by High Country Roses (the owners are siblings). If HCR doesn't have it you could try calling Split Mountain in Jensen, Utah and asking if they have any, they are very obliging.

Joey, beautiful pics! I'll try contacting both to see if they have any available, appreciate it.

Yes, Deborah, one bush. Hang in there.

Sheila, your Queen of Sweden is a wonder, sitting there in all her glory for us to admire. Doesn't she just look like a queen? I love her big, rounded, generous shape and all her court of grasses and other roses at her feet.

Joey, you grow another beautiful queen. What lovely coloring and petals Queen Nerfertiti has. The first bloom is so luscious and subtle in its color. Diane

Flowers, Freedom Garden carries Country Living from time to time in case you'd like another.

Sheila - Your QoS is unbelievable!!!! Holy Hannah!!! :) :)

Joey - I love your QN!! Your 2nd picture is fabulous!!

Sheila, Wow! I've never known Qos could be so big and amazingly gorgeous! How tall is she? I just planted mine in the front of the border and am thinking that maybe I should give her more space to grow.

Well, I thought I'd throw Bishop's Castle into the equation. :) The blooms smell wonderful...old rose...and it's in constant bloom. I had to give it a lot of potassium (Straw recommended) for the canes to be strong enough to hold the blooms up. I'm sure you've all seen these already. :)

Sheila, that's the best QOS I've ever seen.

Rosecanadian, what a beautiful Bishop's Castle! Looks like the color you get is more pale than what I get.

Feiy, my Q of Sweden is 6 ft tall now. Thank you all for all the gorgeous photos.

Shelia, wow! Your Queen if Sweden is fabulous! They prune QoS short each January at Descanso gardens and she doesn’t have that beautiful shape yours has. Do you prune yours or just let her go? It is a quite remarkably beautiful shaped bush.

Thank you, Stephanie. I just let her go. I like her shape getting more graceful and vase shaped over time. She was straight upright the first couple of years.

Sheila, if that's what no pruning can do, I'm tossing my pruners in the trash!

Carol, I'm planning to get Bishop's Castle in the spring and I hope it turns out the color of yours. I don't have any roses that shade.

Noseometer - thanks! :) Really? Usually it's the other way around....we are usually cooler, so we get the darker, less faded blooms.

Sheila - 6 ft tall? Tell Jack to run and get his axe!! Wow!

Flowers - LOL...less work...and looks better....hmmm. :) Yes, BC is a wonderful shade of pink...I love it!! And it's always been that color for me. I hope yours is this color too. :)

Down here, Carol, many roses are that tall, so Q of Sweden, is not extremely outsize compared to others. She is very elegant.

Bishop's Castle is suddenly coming to my attention! I think she is a good match for the color of Summer Romance which is getting huge. My question is will Bishop's Castle get equally huge? I need something about 4 ft tall but in that color healthy and floriferous. I had been considering Olivia or even Cinderella fairy tale but I believe those colors may be too pale and too similar to New Dawn which backs this border.

Darcey Bussell is a great rose in our heat. I also have Golden Celebration, moderate bloomer, James Galway, only Spring and Fall, and Lady of Shallot which is a great bloomer, but the blooms don’t hold up as well as DB in the heat. DB blooms that were forming during 100+ heatwave are semi double but much more fragrant than usual. This rose formed in mid 90s heat a few weeks ago with less petals that the spring blooms but more petals than bloom formed in 100-110F. Maggie is the pink rose with her.

DB in early spring is petal packed with button eye. Shown with GC and JG.

Vaporvac - yeah, I have no idea how big Bishop's Castle would get in your zone....and it wouldn't be confined by a pot. Although hmf says 4 feet. I would definitely give it potassium though ... and lots of water to keep those canes strong.

Sheila - that's a good adjective to use for Queen of Sweden....elegant.

Stephanie - GASP!! Your Darcey Bussell bloom is huge, gorgeous and has a fabulous color!!! Love!! Oh, and it looks great in the garden too! :)

I’ve been wondering if I should have gotten Darcey Bussel instead of Munstead Wood. MW is said to be much more fragrant, but in my garden it is only fragrant when conditions are just right. It’s an okay bloomer, but flowers lose their form, size and color in the heat of summer. The flowers crisp quickly in our dry summer heat. The spring and fall flowers are wonderful though. Sheila, do you have a MW? If so, how does it compare to DB? Stephanie?

Bishop’s Castle would happily grow to 6 feet in my garden if well irrigated. I keep mine rather dry and the flowers are smaller, but it mostly stays about 4 feet and bushy. When the late summer monsoons come and the weather cools down, it shoots up taller basals that get pruned down in the winter.

I grew both Darcey Bussel and Munstead Wood. Darcey bussel has prettier leaves and prettier bush than Munstead Wood. Darcey needs fast drainage so it will do well in sandy soil. Darcey hates my soaking wet clay and died through freezing rain in winter .. don't miss it since it has barely any scent. Munstead Wood fries in full-sun and scent can go away, until I topped with high-potassium compost and high potassium fertlizer ,, that UP the scent considerably. Both bloom equally well but Darcey is a much prettier bush. I rate Munstead wood scent to be 10 times better than Darcey.

I only have MW here, noseometer. I love my two. DB sounds great too. MW always has great color. The bush is prickly of course. Blooms constantly here.

I concur with what Sheila says about Munstead Wood. I grow two, also, and they have great color and bloom well. Nose, in our dry climes, I find the roses with reputed good scent lose a lot of this in the dry air. The hotter and drier the air, the less the scent. Only Rouge Royale stands up well to the hot and dry for me. Diane

Munstead Wood at the local rose gardens is so prickly that it was not allowed in my garden even though he has a great fragrance. DB is low thorn. I personally think a prickly rosebush is ugly. I want the plant to look nice in between flushes. DB always has nice foliage in my garden, with the exception of our 110 day that fried only the old leaves, which were the ones that formed in about February here.

Thorns don't bother me much. I'm pretty prickly myself. Diane

Haha! I love it, Diane! Thorns can be annoying, but with good gloves I'm okay with them. I'm jealous that you have constant blooms, Sheila. Here, everything shuts down in the heat. Well, except for Huntington Rose this year, strangely enough. I get a few blooms on the other roses, but not very many in the heat, and usually small, distorted or with few petals.

I agree with Diane - thorns or no thorns ... I'm okay. What I don 't like are those little prickles that are all over the cane.

Noseometer, things do shut down in some cases with heat, but not MW. We have had 20 days hitting 100F or above this Summer and plenty in the 90s. The garden is not at it's best in August that is for sure.

Nose, yes, some roses do shut down in heat here, while others don't seem to rest much. I didn't mean to give the impression that all roses were blooming all the time. Diane

Reading these comments, I do wonder if many DA roses do better in a bit of a hotter US climate over the more temperate UK climate. Maybe that's too much of a generalisation.

Three years later, I still think Munstead Wood is at the top with Golden Celebration right behind. Tamora, The Prince, Boscobel are close runners up. They are all blooming right now, though the blooms burn up fairly quickly. But then we've been in the 100sF half this summer, and 90s for the remainder. Now we've got wind and smoke to contend with. Small wildfires all around. The wind blows the smoke in, the temp drops a few degrees, then wind blows the smoke out, and temps rise almost instantly. It's kind of funny. So, a bit hotter is quite good, but it's a lot hotter and not so good. Pluses are a fantastic spring flush and no fungal disease and few insects in our dry climate. But, we only get 10 inches of precip in a year, so expensive irrigation with a drip system is necessary, and lots of hand watering of pots. And, water is expensive because unless you're a farmer or a business in an irrigation district, or have your own well for household use out of town, you have to use town water for irrigation which is $$. And we do have a wonderful system of snow melt in the mountains, rivers, reservoirs and dams in place. Plus clean hydroelectric power. The towns around here have artesian wells and hot springs to draw from. I don't know where I'd pick for a perfect rose growing region--maybe San Jose, California or western Oregon. Diane

Bishop‘s Castle is still one of my best for blooming. Desdemona is probably a bit better. But Boscobel is pretty good this year, and so is Abraham Darby. Munstead just fries.

Bishop’s Castle today after 100F.

Desdemona today:

I always presumed that DA roses would do better in their native land than they do here. It used to be that DA's would just grow octopus canes and bloom very little, compared to being well shaped and floriferous plants in the UK. I would be happy to be wrong.

Yes, a dry climate makes for no blackspot and few if any fungal diseases, and few horrible insects. But then having to deal with intense sunlight and wind, so blooms don't last long, and get windburned, or just don't bloom during the heat. Right now the roses that are blooming don't grow before putting out a bud. They just produce a bud from where I dead-headed, and maybe an aborted leaf or two. At least no wildfires here yet. And yes, there is the cost of water and the concern that it may not be the most environmentally conscious thing to be irrigating heavily.

In my UK garden (Hertfordshire), Scarborough Fair and Kew Gardens are the only ones that are pretty much perpetual. The only other one is Julia C but that’s not an Austin. Ones that take a short break are Silas M, Munstead, Lady of S, Desdemona and Boscobel. All the rest take pretty substantial breaks. The worst for me is Eustacia Vye and Gertrude. That being said a lot of my roses are not fully established as I’m fairly new to gardening so I’m hoping this list will grow. For example, I bought Scepter’d Isle as others in the UK say it repeats well but so far it is slow to repeat.

Quick repeating is now probably one of favourite attributes so I want to find more.

Well, Munstead Wood is a true continuous bloomer here, both of mine, which I've grown since MW first was introduced. We have a short growing season with intense heat and a cold season that hits quite suddenly in fall. A couple of years ago, I checked my photo date stamps on MW. She began blooming in May, continued to bloom all season until late November. MW would have done that last year, but the deer got her in late October. Munstead is one tough rose. I like to show these pics of her after the hard frosts had begun, still hanging in there. And she was the last rose standing, something only Julia Child had done. Diane

Wow, seems to be superb in the US. A lot in the UK rave about it too mind. Mine is very new (gifted) and already I’m impressed. Shame DA thinks it ’no longer lives up to our high standards’ and retired it when it seems to top so many people’s lists, both US and UK (though more often raved about in US). Diane, would you say Golden C is the same for you in terms of repeating compared to MW? Do you have any pictures?

Golden Celebration is almost as good as Munstead in repeat bloom. Both roses are blooming away right now and it's 104F, and will probably reach 106F or so. It was 90F at midnight last night. Just had to mention our wonderful heat wave. Almost all my roses are blooming, including a lot of Austins. The Prince is in a flush, but he has a lot of wonky buds and the blooms are really little. Silly guy. Yes, David Austin is nutz to retire Munstead Wood, and I've given up trying to understand that company. I have tons of pics of Golden Celebration which I've grown for about 15-16 years. This rose is enormous and is about 9 feet tall. I like them big. Diane

GC with Boscobel, another almost continuous bloomer.

The David Austin roses can be very climate specific. I also caution against reading the older posts because many of the roses listed (EVELYN for example) are no longer available. It is a thing they do once one of their roses is out of patent: stop producing it and prevent their sellers from doing the same. Since they also own the name, any nursery trying to sell an out of patent rose cannot use the name consumers are familiar with. Needless to say, these business practices have not endeared them to this rosarian.

That being said, CHARLOTTE and MOLINEUX have almost continuous bloom in the Mid-Atlantic, USDA Zone 7a. LADY OF SHALLOT is not far behind. I advise grabbing Charlotte first while you still can.

Diane, I love that pink apricot blush on some of your Golden Celebration blooms! Just gorgeous!

For me, Desdemona and Lady Of Shallot repeat very well. Desdemona is very healthy and clean. LOS on the other hand is very BS prone.