For years the topic of "dedteriorated/-ating" cultivars has been discussed. Deterioration through overbudding/poor budding practices, virused plant material, and so on (and I believe it is generally accepted Peace simply HAS deteriorated at this point)....does anyone else find Fragrant Cloud much less robust and healthy now than it was years ago? Having a tough time getting a solid plant. Tried mail order, not robust. Tried the garden center here and the plant is barely making it along. Several years ago I had a really nice, healthy first year plant that ended up with both mosiac and witch's broom (the later is not a virus I realize)....just wondering if anyone else has experienced what might be a deterioration with Fragrant Cloud...

Just bought a new plant of this rose, after years without it. It's on own roots, and it looks quite good
It was delivered by courier shipping (together with other plants), already in bud, and when I opened the pack, I found 2 large buds which where broken. One of them was already opening though, and I collected it to put it in a
vase.
What can I say? I almost forgot how beautiful and how fragrant this rose is. The form is beautiful, the colour is a very vivid coral (difficult to reproduce in photo), which is so rare in an intensely fragrant rose, and the fragrance itself is really astonishing, I was able to detect it even before opening the pack. It's very rich and deep, a little bit spicy and with just a slight touch of tea, but above all, very intensely rosy. Something in between centifolia, Louise Odier and Tiffany, with the deepness of Papa Meilland. After smelling it, one of my absolute preferred fragrant roses, Rose de Resht, was quite difficult to smell... Fragrant Cloud saturates your nose!
I seriously think it should be grown for the extraction of fragrance. It actually smells a little bit like the best rose soap possible.
After two days in a minuscule cup, the detached flower has still retained a good colour, a coral which is just a little bit less bright than before. The scent is still strong, with a little bit more of tea and a little bit less of rose, but still very good and intense. This buds are literally packed with essential oil LOL! That's why it should be extracted!
Looking forward for next flowers from her, the first should open in a couple days!


Update: I just bought another plant of Fragrant Cloud (in Italy it's often sold as Nuage Parfumé), at a local grower. It's a grafted plant by NIRP, quite big and robust, likely two years old, in full bloom.
When I saw it, casually mixed with much more recent varieties (mostly introduced by Kordes, Poulsen and Meilland), the colour and the flower formation (very similar to Peace to my eyes) made me immediately suspect it was this much older beauty, but I was in doubt because I'd never saw one plant of this cultivar at a local grower before. The perfume was a little bit faded because of the afternoon heat, but the tag confirmed that my guess was correct... I just HAD to buy it.
As soon as I took it out of the place and some fresh air mitigated the heat, the scent exploded back, and it was really awesome.
I realized that it smells almost exactly like a pretty expensively eau de parfum used by a former girlfriend of mine, "Paris" by YSL.

Update: my own roots Fragrant Cloud plant is giving some new flowers now. They're still not as full potential for dimension and petal number (I think it'll need another year of growth), but on own roots it looks like cookie is even more vivid, I'd say more of a full, fluorescent geranium red rather than just coral red in the first and second day (I had to correct the colour a lot on this photo, because it burns the camera sensor of my phone even in the shade of early morning), and perfume is shockingly strong in the best moments (less so in hottest hours), it numbs the olfactory receptors and makes other very fragrant roses almost scentless in comparison.

Update: both grafted and own roots plants of F.C. are giving new blooms like crazy. Luckily, it looks like the nurseries from where these plants come, have good virus-free reproduction material.