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Rosa cantabrigiensis

This is the earliest shrub rose to make a real show at Saling, an eight-foot plant of great elegance, taller than its width, holding its fragile flowers where the light can best reach them. They come out pale yellow, then rapidly fade to cream, almost hiding the fine fretted leaves.

It is one of a number of hybrids from the Cambridge University Botanic Garden in the 1930s, a cross between two Chinese species, T. sericea (famous for its thorns) and R. hugonis (the Hugh was a missionary in China in the 1890s, Father Hugh Scallon). We planted it to replace R. 'Canary Bird', which never really got going here. The Cambridge rose seems to me better in every way.

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