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After several years, now I have a garden and I purchased a plant of Harlow Carr, but this time it's on own roots (bought it at Nino Sanremo, a 100% own roots rose nursery). Unfortunately, they hadn't 2 years old plants available of this variety, so it's a smallish 1 year old plant (but pretty thickly branched).
I bought it potted, by mail order, and it was quite late in the season... The first flush all got lost. After about one month, now it's back covered in blooms, and the first one just opened.
It has the quality to give flowers even on very thin branches, like the one which is blooming now. It's as beautiful as I remembered: a neatly formed shallow cupped rosette, with a little green button in the center (but sometimes it has more of a button)... and it's perfect even on such a thin lateral branch, on a 1 years old own roots plant. At the moment, the colour is a medium, very nice and very pure pink like its "grandmother" Comte de Chambord, or Chapeau de Napoleon, or a slightly paler Gertrude Jekyll... full old rose character. Foliage is slightly shiny though, so a little bit more modern looking.
Fragrance is old rose too, but with a little touch of sugary anise, like Heritage. It's already intense, but I suspect it will develop stronger as the plant will get more robust (central branches already are definitely stronger than the one flowering at the moment).
And the thorns problem, of course. Yeah, it's a little thorn monster, that's very true. Slightly arched thorns, very crowded, of various length and thickness (but on average quite long and thin), and some of them detach pretty easily... they're quite like some old Gallica thorns, but much longer and aggressive. It's a bush which is definitely needing care when you're handling it, because its thorns easily grasp everywhere, and yeah the thin branches grasp with each others, making it more difficult to arrange the branches as you want (or sometimes, making it easier when you want to block the branches on something ahahah).
But in my opinion, this is not nearly enough to make me think that I should get rid of this extreme beauty, of pretty unique character.
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