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Spring in the Arizona desert brings a sense of expectation and the stirrings of new life. “You see the first flush and the first bloom,” Tyler Francis, a farmer, tells me one morning as we tear around the fields of Francis Roses, the world’s second-largest grower, in his white Ford pickup. The young bushes crop up at this time of year, but the real thrill arrives in November, when they are fully mature. Francis’s farm grows more than 1,000 varieties, making the fields at harvest luscious and ambrosial. He tells me, “There are very few things that bring that much passion and joy.”
We are here to see the first days of an infant flower: lush, fragrant, and destined for gardens nationwide. It is a floribunda, bright and bushy in the ground, with a deep, dawny peach color, more than 50 petals to each flower. It has the fragrance of soft summer mornings on the coast—citrus, licorice, a tincture of vanilla—and an eagerness to bloom. And it’s new. In a world of roses colored by a traditional lineup of reds, whites, yellows, pinks, and oranges, this bloom represents not only a new breed but a new way of thinking about the nation’s favorite flower.
In the postwar years, Francis explains, roses were bred to fit into a landscape of female domestic chores: You dusted and vacuumed your house; you sprayed and pruned your rosebushes. Women today, thankfully, have broader opportunities. “You get people like my wife, who have two kids, who work,” Francis says, bringing the truck to a stop. “They’re not going to go out into the garden and start deadheading.” Gardening fathers are similarly beset. Fortunately, advances in rose breeding are making better, less finicky flowers—ever-blooming, self-cleaning (i.e., they don’t require deadheading), fragrant, and resistant to disease. The peach-colored buds we have come to see emerged from decades of cultivation, and when Francis first saw the flower, he had a eureka feeling.
Meet the Vogue Anniversary Rose.
A while back, the editors of this magazine confronted a new version of a familiar challenge: How to celebrate the passage of time without raking tediously over the past? Vogue turns 125 this year, an impressive age for any publication. But dragging out last year’s (or century’s) stuff isn’t what the magazine has ever been about. Was there a way to celebrate the past with something brand-new—an icon of fashion that grows toward the future? How about a rose?
The idea seemed predestined. The fall runways in New York were so dense with rose prints this February (recall Prabal Gurung, Brock Collection, and Tanya Taylor, to say nothing of Adam Selman’s sending out a model covered in actual stemmed roses) that the Los Angeles Times called a trend: “Everything’s coming up roses.” And when Beyoncé heralded her pregnancy in a styled Instagram photo? Those weren’t geraniums behind her.
But if plucking the idea out of the air was easy, anointing a new flower was a thornier proposition. The naming of roses has become one of the dimly lit, mysterious back corridors of celebrity culture, lodged somewhere between wax museums and franchise emoji. There is a Christian Dior rose (red), a John F. Kennedy rose (white), and a Miranda Lambert rose (rousing hot pink). There’s a Catherine Deneuve (elegant coral, in the French style), a Marilyn Monroe (pale blonde and said to smell like peaches), and a Rosie O’Donnell (loony red tips, possibly shippable to the White House). If there was to be a Vogue rose, it would have to be—well, what? A list of ideal qualities emerged.
First, the Vogue rose should be elegant and of its moment—because standard-setting is important. It should be exquisitely fragrant because, to quote Coco Chanel (who borrowed in turn from the poet Paul Valéry), “a woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.” It should be an English rose (the layered, heavily petaled variety favored in gardens, rather than the quick-to-wilt things sold in grocery stores), but with New World roots. Instead of the dusty, dark foliage that often droops below vivacious blooms, it should have leaves as bright and glossy as this magazine. And because fashion is adaptable, fast-traveling, and global, it should be able to thrive anywhere: planted in a Los Angeles garden, potted on a New York City patio, or set along a boulevard in Paris or Milan.
Stephen Scanniello, best known as the former longtime curator of the Cranford Rose Garden in Brooklyn, put Vogue in touch with rose breeders, including Brad Jalbert of Select Roses, a star hybridizer near Vancouver who was raising some of the most interesting new flowers around. Breeding roses is like breeding animals: You take the pollen from one variety (the “father”) and apply it to another (the “mother”); a few months later, seeds are gathered from the mother’s rosehips and planted. Cross two varieties repeatedly, and you’ll get different offspring every time. Most breeders get one promising rose from as many as 10,000 new seeds they create; Jalbert can work that to one in 1,000.
Finding that one, however, requires eight years of scrutiny. Does the plant look healthy? Can it survive winter or shade? Are the flowers interesting and new? (Rose growers disparage what they shorthand J.A.P.—“just another pink.”) Many beautiful roses smell bad—I encountered one redolent of fried food—and more have no fragrance at all. Year after year, breeds get cut from the running. “It’s the only thing in the world I have patience for,” Jalbert says. “Except dogs.”
It was almost a decade ago that Jalbert crossed the apricot-colored Loretta Lynn Van Lear (his own creation) with Julia Child (a popular, fragrant yellow rose). “I remember when that rose was born,” he says; the young plant caught his eye—and nose—and held it. The breed, which he labeled Jal‑011‑2‑10, was an English-style rose with leaves of an unusual, glossy bright green. It seemed to resist most diseases, such as black spot. It bloomed, and bloomed again, and then again, from spring to fall. It could thrive as an “own root” rose (not a graft onto another root system), which meant that it could freeze to its base in winter and reemerge, in spring, as itself. And it “trimmed” its own flowers, growing into a lush, leafy bush of knee height.
A breeder normally hopes to find the rare rose that brings together two or more desirable qualities: color, blooming habit, fragrance, resistance, shape, maintenance. A breed that combines all is a moon shot. By some cosmic turn of destiny, Jal‑011‑2‑10 was reaching its debutante age just as Vogue was scouring the country for its perfect rose. Jalbert sent the magazine several of his new breeds, but there was never any competition. This was a match made not in heaven but deep in the earth: Jal‑011‑2‑10 was the long-sought-after Vogue rose.
By late afternoon, Francis and I are careering toward the Phoenix airport, on our way to the next outpost on the path of rose production. He’s on speakerphone, making an adjustment to his flight. When a customer-service rep breaks through the hold music—“Hel-lo!”—he asks her, as he often does, what she knows about roses.
“A lot!” the woman exclaims. She has kept Mister Lincoln, Cécile Brünner, Veterans’ Honor. “I like Queen Elizabeth, Sterling Silver, Apricot Nectar——”
“Yup!” Francis says, and smiles. (Later, he tells me he can guess at her age from this list.) “Do you know there’s going to be a Vogue Anniversary Rose?”
“Oh!” the customer-service woman exclaims with delight. “For heaven’s sake!”
After landing in Dallas, we drive to Tyler, Texas, the self-proclaimed rose capital of America. Today it’s home to Certified Roses, which packages the Vogue Anniversary Rose in containers for sale. (It will be available through Jackson & Perkins on its release this month.) Certified is also the final proving ground for roses approaching market. The East Texas climate is harsh—it can be 100 degrees in summer, sometimes with up to 100 percent humidity—and only the best plants escape blight. This is the final edit, and a crucial one: Even after years of winnowing, a new breed will be abandoned if it doesn’t perform.
I drive out to the greenhouses with Francis and the head of Certified, Lawrence Valdez, who stroll between small potted rosebushes, snapping off blooms, ruffling the petals, huffing the perfume, and crumbling the flowers in their hands. At this stage, they are studying fragrance, “inner nodes” (the gaps between leaf clusters, which should be minimal to avoid a tall, scrawny plant), and “habit” (does the bush grow in a pleasant, symmetrical way, or does it shoot off in bizarre directions?). As with the length of a dress or the height of a heel, it’s a call of experience and eye.
“So you see all of this weirdness,” Francis says, tossing an unsatisfactory flower aside. “Then you come to the Vogue Anniversary Rose, and you’re like, Oh, yeah.”
We have reached four sawed-off barrels where the new bushes have been planted. The foliage is tight and orderly. There are buds everywhere. The plant is thriving more than 2,000 miles from home—and that is just the start of its new life.
Click here to purchase Vogue’s Anniversary Rose.
Vogue receives a portion of the profits from the sale of this rose.