Blossom Blanket™ Groundcover Rose

Combine the vigor and flower power of a shrub rose with the beauty and majesty of a floribunda and you have an idea of what to expect in Blossom Blanket. This mini-flora or patio rose is a terrific groundcover, swiftly spreading 4 feet wide yet standing only about 18 inches off the ground in full bloom. Bred from the classic polyantha The Fairy, it is prepared to take on your sunny borders and fill the garden with lovely color all season.

Blossom Blanket may be small, but it is ultra-tough. Very disease resistant mid-green foliage clothes these branches, and each flowering stem offers a big bouquet of about a dozen 1-inch blooms. The flowers begin as powder-pink buds, opening a creamy white with a large central mass of yellow stamens. As they mature, the petals turn soft porcelain pink again, creating a soft multicolored look on a fully blooming shrub.

And these are the classic shrub rose flowers you remember from country lanes. Flat, semi-double (15 to 20 petals), and wide open, they have the old-fashioned look that never goes out of style, and is especially effective in a big cluster. Waves of fresh blooms appear all summer, needing little attention from you. Such a pleasure to have a low-maintenance, ultra-reliable rose carpeting the garden floor.

Blossom Blanket comes to us from British breeder Colin Dickson, who introduced it in 2002. A very popular rose in England, it is known as Newly Wed on that side of the pond, but here it has always been Jackson & Perkins's Blossom Blanket. The Fairy (Bentall's classic 1932 introduction) is its pollen parent; its seed parent is an unnamed seedling. We think that once you grow Blossom Blanket in your own landscape, you will share our belief that this is one of the most beautiful of all groundcover roses, and certainly the easiest to maintain.