Relatively sublime colors on a hideously sprawling plant and with hideously poor bloom form. And the blooms are way too small for the huge gangly plant. But she is 76 and still around!
They had it at Washington Park for years, planted in rows next to modern HT/GRs. It was bolt upright and quite naked. With each leaf set far above the next. Then, these little semi-double, ragged blooms on top. It looked like Queen Elizabeth (the rose...) just came back from war lol.
But they must have loved it a lot back in the 1930s, because obviously someone loved it enough to place it there. Maybe the color tone was novel enough. Maybe it was the name. Who knows. I don't. I saw HTs from that era of that color palette that I felt were superior, on much more manageable plants.
This rose isn't known for its scent, but while harvesting pollen from it today, I discovered there IS scent. The stigma, stamen and anthers contain a rather strong "clove" scent. The petals have no scent to them, but the stigma continues carrying the "clove" scent once the stamen are cut from it and the collected stamen and anthers also smell of "clove". That scent intensifies as the anthers/stamen dry.
According to Wikipedia "Charlotte, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg", the Grande–Duchesse was hereditary ruler in her own right of Luxembourg. But when the Luxemburgish breeders named the rose after her she was living in London in exile from German occupation.
This website (http://www.industrie.lu/rosesluxembourg.html) names this rose as Grande-Duchesse Charlotte with a hyphen. It says the rose won Ketten Frères a gold medal at Rome in 1939. The full name of Luxembourg in French was (and is) le Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, which so to speak is where the hyphen comes from. I believe French is still the preferred official language.
