Grateful Heart® Hybrid Tea Rose

These huge, perfectly sculpted hybrid tea roses are not only beautiful and subtly fragrant, but also on a mission. So while you grow and enjoy these magnificent blooms, you are also helping raise awareness for the world's foremost killer: cardiovascular disease.

Grateful Heart is particularly appropriate to represent the AHA's good work. The 30 petals on these fully double blooms are bright red, set atop 14- to 18-inch stems above lush dark green foliage. These flowers open from pointed ovoid buds to spread 5 inches wide. Unforgettable in the garden, they are simply breathtaking when massed in the vase.

And Grateful Heart is as robust and long-lived as its strong presence suggests. Fully hardy through Zone 5 in the north, it can be grown in regions of Zone 4 as well with good winter protection. Nicely branched, upright, and naturally symmetrical, it is an impressive presence in the sunny border at 5 feet tall and 4 feet wide.

The offspring of Rose Moonstone, Grateful Heart has inherited its parent's soft, rich coloring and slightly recurved petal tips. The reverse of each petal is a lighter red to deep pink, and the clove-influenced fragrance is discernable only at close range, or in a large indoor arrangement of blooms. The beauty of Grateful Heart is pervasive, and it is a rose you will admire anew each year, finding new merits in its blooms.

All of us know someone who has been touched in some way by cardiovascular disease, and Grateful Heart enables us to honor their struggle while also contributing to the progress in the field. Grow this rose in memory of loved ones and in the passionate determination to create a brighter future for all.