Rose varieties explained: O’Hara, Candlelight and spray roses
WTF! What The Flowers florists · Dnipro
Shops call them all simply «roses», but varieties differ hugely. Garden, classic and spray roses compared: scent, vase life, appearance.
Price lists just say «rose», so it looks like the only choices are colour and quantity. In practice, a garden O’Hara and a classic Dutch rose differ more than a rose differs from a tulip: different shape, different scent, different vase life. Here are the three groups that make up almost any bouquet.
Garden roses. The best known are Pink and White O’Hara, Miss Piggy, Juliet. The bud is dense, several dozen petals, and it opens into a ball rather than holding the classic pointed shape. The reason people choose them is scent: it genuinely fills a room, which a classic rose will not do. The honest downside: they last 5 to 8 days, less than classics, and cost roughly a third more.
Classic single-head roses. Freedom, Red Naomi, Explorer, Mondial. One bud per stem, 50 to 80 cm tall, thick petals. This is the most durable group: 10 to 14 days in a vase and often longer, losing shape slowly. There is almost no scent, and that is not a defect but the result of breeding for transport and vase life, with fragrance the first thing to go.
Spray roses. Cherry Trendsetter, Mansfield Park, Bombastic, Yana. Three to five smaller buds per stem, so the bouquet looks noticeably fuller for the same stem count and costs less than a mono of large roses. One property rarely explained: the buds open at different times, so the bouquet keeps changing for several days and reads as garden-grown rather than shop-bought.
A note on colour. Candlelight is creamy apricot, and its shade shifts markedly with the light: nearly white in daylight, golden under a warm lamp. Red Eye is deep red with an almost black petal edge. Blue and black roses, however, do not exist in nature: they are either dyed white varieties (the dye sits on the petal and rubs off on your fingers) or very dark burgundy ones given a dramatic name.
Choosing for the situation. If you want scent and the bouquet is given tonight: garden roses. If it has to last as long as possible, say the flowers go to an office or another region: classics. If you want volume on a budget: spray roses. The combination we build most often is a few garden roses as the centre plus spray roses for volume: you get the scent, you get the size, and the price stays below a pure mono.
One practical habit: you can almost always ask for the variety. If a shop does not know which variety is in the bouquet, that in itself tells you how they work with growers. What is in stock right now is in the rose catalogue.
