‘Rose du Roi’
Portland roses are a small group of hybrids derived from a rose named after a plant-collecting Duchess of Portland around 1780. The original is bright red, and flowers every six weeks or so through summer and autumn.
Once thought to contain ‘China blood’, it has now been conclusively established by DNA analysis that they are in fact hybrids of Gallicas and Autumn Damasks, from which they inherit their repeat-flowering.
One of the earliest cultivars derived from the duchess’s rose was ‘Rose du Roi’, itself an ancestor of the Hybrid Perpetuals.