After seeing the photos posted on here with what looks like a quite informal habit with lovely coloured eglantine-like flowers I purchased this rose bush and planted it yesterday. I’m in France and bought from a web reseller and in their very detailed description they state that TBG is a musk hybrid so that should bode well for the heat and watering yet some comments suggest otherwise. Looking forward to seeing how this one grows.

Update 27 October - after planting at the worst possible time in the middle of a drought with temperatures here over 30C and after almost four months this variety has grown extremely vigorously with a first flush in August of around 12-13 blooms and now there is a 4ft high cane with 4 buds and one huge 5-petal flower. There is some blackspot on the lower foliage but above all the flowers are joyful and make me smile.

In my hot, humid mid-Atlantic (eastern U.S.) garden, this rose defoliates completely from blackspot after the first flush of blooms and remains naked for the duration of the summer (I do not spray for blackspot). Its blooms do all result in sizeable, healthy, fairly elongated hips, but flowering pretty much shuts down after the first flush here (many roses do that here, even if they are not loaded with fruits). The flowers are nice enough with their pale yellow color and simple form, but they do not last long either individually or collectively. After the relatively brief spring display I basically have a see-through rose with hips.

This variety is probably my favourite out of all the ones I grow. The shrub is uniform in growth and looks good in the garden, be it formal or not. It has excellent vigour and shoots up frequent basal canes (I bought it as a bare root, and was therefore a 1 year plant. It had 8 basal canes! In the first couple months in the ground, it produced three more). No diseases to speak of. It flowers abundantly and frequently. Its flowers are simple, but perfectly formed and huge. Blooms are in clusters of 3/5 on lateral canes, up to 30 on basals. As specified by other users, it reblooms without deadheading and flowers even if hips are left to form on the plant. Each bloom seems to be followed by a hip. Scent is not strong but it's definitely there, and pleasant. Flowers open in a nice yellow lemon; they do fade to an almost translucent yellow, but it is quite pleasant. As one may expect, every time you walk close to a flowering Tottering-By-Gently, you'll meet a bee or some other kind of pollinator.
It does need more water than the average rose; my specimen is still young and it may improve with time, but it shows signs of water deficiency before most of the other varieties I have had for a similar amount of time.

Per the patent, the seed parent is a big shrub with semidouble, apricot blooms, where the pollen parent is white, single and with upright growth. It may well be the Lark Ascending x Kew Gardens


Edit 10/2022: having been through one of the worst droughts in decades last summer, it looks like to me that Tottering-by-gently may not be especially drought and heat resistant; those factors are not usually a huge problem for me, since my climate provides my plants with enough rainwater during summer. Now, my TbG was not completely established yet, but it kept telling me that a weekly deep watering during heat waves with 38°C daily highs was not quite enough for her. Not like it died back or anything, but it basically stopped production and its leaves looked sunburnt. Hopefully it was just a weird year and it's not our new climate...

… continuous bloom and even without deadheading.... setting hips too..

...flowers are quite large for the type and stand out... I think a nice rose in the making... it sends up good basals… and suitable for an obelisk...