Like Father, LIKE SON
The David Austin name is synonymous with roses. In the 1950s, beguiled by the romance of the old garden roses – gallicas, damasks, albas and centifolias – David C. H. Austin (1926-2018) began crossing these pink, red and white blooms with the modern hybrid teas that were so popular at the time. His aim was to attain the perfect ‘English rose’: a plant with the beauty, grace and scent of the old varieties and the colours and repeat-flowering habit of the newcomers.
During his career he introduced around 200 new cultivars, from ‘Constance Spry’ in 1961 (not a repeat flowerer) and, in 1983, his first full successes, pink ‘Mary Rose’ and golden-petalled ‘Graham Thomas’, to lemon-yellow shrub ‘Tottering-by-Gently’, one of
