Roses have come a long way this century. Those classic bushes with beautiful florist’s flowers are out of favor with most gardeners – all that spraying and care takes too much time, and most of us just don’t have that. Instead we are seeing breeders creating amazing new roses that are disease-resistant and that can be grown just like any other garden shrub – plant it, give it some water, spend a few minutes trimming, and enjoy. We are really pleased we have found a supply of perhaps the best of all these new shrubs – the Oso Easy® Landscape Roses. Some are for the fronts of beds, but for a little further back, or where you want something larger, the Pink Cupcake Oso Easy Landscape Rose stands out – we simply love it, and you will too.

The Pink Cupcake Oso Easy Landscape Rose grows in a couple of years into a broad mounded shrub as much as 4 feet wide and across, so it has real ‘presence’ and it fills your beds with beauty and color. The leaves are made up of 5 or 7 leaflets, each about 1 inch long, with a serrated edge. The leaves are glossy and an attractive deep green. The foliage is dense and goes right to the ground, and because this plant is disease-resistant the leaves stay all season – no more half-bare rose bushes by mid-summer. Flowering is profuse, with over 150 blooms per season on a mature bush, carried in trusses of up to 18 buds. Each blossom is 2 inches in diameter when open, with around 18 petals in each flower, making a semi-double bloom with a casual beauty. The coloring is delicious – a gorgeous ‘pink icing’ color toned down by a touch of coral. The stems of the flowers are long enough to allow you to cut a bunch for a small vase too, so you get to enjoy the blooms both indoors and outdoors. As well, a delicious sweet fragrance flows from every blossom, making sniffing an additional pleasure available from this great plant.

Grow the Pink Cupcake Oso Easy Landscape Rose anywhere in your garden. Plant it among the evergreens around your home. Mix it with flowering shrubs in your beds. Grow a row along a driveway or against a fence for a colorful display all season. Grow it to cover a bank, or to top a wall with beauty. It can even be grown in large planters, or in a pot, perhaps alongside other flowering shrubs in pots, like hydrangeas, and clustered attractively by a doorway. It fits equally well into neat garden beds and into more casual natural plantings too.

Plant the Pink Cupcake rose in full sun – shade will noticeably reduce the flowering, and there are lots of other shrubs for shade, like azaleas. The ideal soil has some clay in it, and it is moist but well-drained. Adding plenty of organic material like compost when planting will feed your bush and improve both water retention in sand and drainage in heavier soil. It is hardy even in zone 4, without any special winter protection, and it needs no fancy pruning and trimming. Removing weak and damaged stems in early spring, and a little shortening back of the longer branches is all it takes to keep this landscape rose neat, bushy and full of blooms. Years of trials and testing have proven beyond doubt that this rose is highly resistant to the worst rose disease – black spot. The leaves will stay fresh, green and on the stems, instead of yellowing, turning black and falling off by late summer. Its natural vigor help protect it against other pests and diseases, and it is no more trouble to grow than any common garden shrub.

The Pink Cupcake Oso Easy Landscape Rose was developed by Christopher Warner, an English rose breeder in the UK, who runs a remarkable one-man nursery in Newport, Shropshire. A winner of multiple awards, he always tests his roses for at least 5 years to prove their disease resistance. The variety we call Pink Cupcake was found among a batch of seedlings he grew from a cross-pollination he carried out in 1999. He took pollen from a special rose plant he had developed, called ‘Scrivbell’, and used it to pollinate ‘Anna Livia’, an orange-pink rose created in 1985 by the famous German breeder Reimer Kordes. In 2005 he selected a plant he called ‘Chewallbell’ from among the seedlings, and that is today the plant we call Pink Cupcake. It was patented in 2016 and it is made available as part of the Oso Easy® Landscape Rose collection by Spring Meadow Nursery Inc., of Grand Haven Michigan. One of their Proven Winners® ColorChoice® range of flowering shrubs, this plant is a winner, as all the 5-star reviews make clear. Ordinary gardeners are loving the combination of beauty, masses of blooms, and ease of care that this great bush brings to your garden. Order right away, because these plants are just, ‘Oh, so easy!’ that everyone wants them, and we only have a limited supply.