The White Drift® Rose is a new and exciting miniature rose that turns roses from fussy plants into easy garden shrubs. Throw away that sprayer, because it is disease resistant. Forget about learning elaborate pruning methods, because it will grow well even if you never touch it. Even better, rather than one flowering a year, and a few follow-up blooms if you are lucky, you get continuous blooming from early summer right into fall. White is always a popular garden color, and now you can enjoy it on a beautiful small rose that is as easy to grow as any garden shrub.
Growing White Drift® Rose Bushes
The White Drift® Rose soon becomes a mound of blooms 18 inches tall and 3 feet across. That is the perfect size for the front of a border, edging a walkway, cascading over a wall or out of a planter box. It is ideal as a single plant in a smaller garden, or mass planted in larger beds. With that spread you only need to space your plants 2 feet apart, so a few fill a big space, saving you money and time. It is just as good in planter boxes, and a whole lot more economical and efficient than planting annual flowers every year. Mix it with some of our other Drift® Roses for a kaleidoscope of summer-long color.
The flowers of the White Drift® Rose may be small, but they are produced abundantly. A bush typically has over a hundred blooms at any one time, and they are carried in clusters of 10 to 15 on every branch. The flowers are a little over one inch across when fully open, with 80 densely packed petals in every flower. The flowers are a beautiful pure white – a color that always looks great in the garden, no matter what other colors you have around it. At the base of the petals, if you look closely, you will see that the white becomes a very fashionable shade of pale green. This plant does not produce seeds, so rather than having to trim dead flowers, they simply drop their petals and fade away.
Planting and Initial Care
Plant the White Drift® Rose in full sun, in ordinary garden soil. Roses are great plants for heavier soils, so if you have clay that is not always wet, you can grow terrific roses. In sandy soils the secret is to use lots of rich organic material dug into the soil and spread as mulch, as well as regularly using rose fertilizer. That will keep those blooms coming and coming month after month. In planter boxes make sure you have drainage holes and mix a little garden soil into regular potting soil – about one part of soil to two parts of potting soil is a good blend. Use liquid rose fertilizer regularly in planters for the best results.
Unlike other roses, you don’t have to bother with spring pruning, but you will get slightly better growth if you take a few minutes to remove thin, weak branches low down, and trim the tip from the stronger ones. As spring arrives new shoots will burst out, and your plants will be back in bloom very soon. Nasty rose diseases are no longer a problem with the White Drift® Rose. Mildew, Black Spot, and Rust all stay away from this vigorous plant
History and Origins of the White Drift® Rose
The White Drift® Rose is a superb member of an exciting new group of roses that has everyone talking. These Drift® Roses all feature small blooms on small plants, but they are plants that bloom continuously and that have been bred for trouble-free growing and disease resistance. These roses were first developed in France by Alain Meilland, part of the famous rose family that gave the world the classic ‘Peace’ rose at the end of WWII. He used an old miniature rose from the 1930s called ‘The Fairy’ in a complex breeding program with many other seedlings and dwarf varieties to develop the first Drift® Roses in the late 90s and early 2000s. Many of these were brought to America to be grown and sold, at the Conrad-Pyle Nursery in West Grove, Pennsylvania. In 2011 a sharp-eyed grower spotted a branch on a plant of the pink colored Sweet Drift® Rose (`Meiwetdom`), which had white blooms. In 2017 it was patented as ‘Meizorland’, and it became the White Drift® Rose.
We are amazed at the popularity of the Drift® Roses, and we have a big stock to deal with the demand. But it is going fast, so don’t hesitate, and order your White Drift® roses right away. Perhaps you want to add some other Drift® Roses at the same time – they will all look great with White Drift, no matter what colors you choose from this amazing range. Order now.
