PlantFiles: Hybrid Musk Rose
Rosa 'Cornelia'

I grow roses "cottage garden" style, because I don't spray and planting roses among companion plants with more attractive leaves is not only more fun but such an alternative to Augusts of bare, defoliated thorny sticks festooned with little piles of diseased leaves here and there cutely draped by spider mites.

To the rescue comes Cornelia - it's Super-Rose minus superman's cape. It didn't do much the first few years, but it always hung in there with generous flowering in May in spite of a magnolia overhead. When the magnolia lost much of its canopy a few years ago, Cornelia shot up from 5' to 20' (after 20 years). It's clusters of tiny, double flowers are very perfumed and the first rose to bloom in our garden (continuing less prolifically into late summer). The flowers are delicate, pale pink but shadows from petal on petal make it look deeper pink - that plus its show of gold stamens makes the little, not-much-scent flowers on The Fairy look like thugs.

A stone wall drops down about 4' below Cornelia with variegated periwinkle cascading down and the magnolia and yew hedge rising up behind. Mongolian aster (kalimeris) blooms up through Cornelia's branches in late summer with the intensely fragrant hosta plantaginea behind. There is always new growth on Cornelia which makes her always look good.

I hope this gives an idea of what a tough, disease resistant, but dainty beauty Cornelia is.