AARS 2009 Winners Offer Something for Everyone

Ellen C. Wells

All-America Rose Selections’ (AARS) winning rose varieties for 2009—Carefree Spirit, Pink Promise and Cinco de Mayo—represent three different rose classes and offer gardeners a range to meet their gardening needs.

Carefree Spirit, hybridized by Jacques Mouchotte of Meilland International and introduced by Conard-Pyle, is the first landscape shrub in AARS’s 70-year history to survive under two-year test conditions without any fungicide sprays and be voted a winner. It’s a mounding rose with deep-red
blossoms with white markings. It has similar features to its parent, Carefree Delight, with better disease resistance, habit and bloom.

Pink Promise, a hybrid tea with long stems suitable for cutting, is a graceful bloomer with large pink, fragrant flowers set against dark-green foliage. Its beauty is matched by good disease resistance and an ability to bloom in cooler climates. Hybridized by Jim Coiner and introduced by Coiner Nursery of LaVerne, California, Pink Promise has also been chosen as the official rose of the National Breast Cancer Foundation. A percentage of the sale of every Pink Promise plant will be donated to the Foundation to advance its education and early detection initiatives.

With smoky lavender and rusty red-orange colored flowers and a fragrance of fresh-cut apples, Cinco de Mayo is a unique floribunda. Its multicolored blooms sit among glossy green foliage and dark-red new growth. It has disease resistance and nationwide performance worthy of an AARS winner, and its round habit is well suited to hedges or mixed perennial borders. Cinco de Mayo, an offspring of the 2006 AARS award-winning Julia Child, was hybridized by Tom Carruth and introduced by Weeks Roses.