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My newly-planted David Austin roses fascinate me, especially ‘William Shakespeare 2000’. The buds look innocent enough:
Then the rose opens and it looks like, well, a typical rose:
But then like clowns tumbling out of a Volkswagen, the petals keep unfurling…almost 120 of them to be exact. And soon you have this:
The flowers have that ever-so-intoxicating old-rose scent on big, beautiful blooms that resemble peonies. ‘William Shakespeare 2000’ grows 3 to 4 feet tall. The upright plants bloom off and on throughout the summer and are disease-resistant.
A bonus for this rose is that it has so many tightly-wound petals that the Japanese beetles throw up their tiny hands in disgust and move on to other plants.