tantefrancine said:Several roses that I have purchased are supposed to have strong fragrance, but to me, they are not fragrant at all.
Fragrance is a very subjective experience and all sorts of things affect our sense of smell including foods, medications, and perfumes.
Sometimes the very same rose plant has different levels of fragrance under different conditions. The sweetest and most powerful rose fragrance event I have noticed was a single flower of Sombreuil on a relatively new plant from Antique Rose Emporium. I smelled it from more than 20 ft away, a powerful fragrance of tea and honeysuckle. I never did get that plant to produce the same scent - not to the same extent. My guess is that it needed more attentive care.
There are only a handful of roses I can think of that are fragrant with (nearly) complete reliability. But I only grow 200 cultivars.
Ambridge Rose always smells the same to me. David Austin calls the scent myrrh. Blanc Double de Coubert seems reliably fragrant with more of a spicy smell. Mme Isaac Perreire is a champion of old rose fragrance. Baronne Prevost does not reliably open in spring, here; but its open flowers are always seem fragrant to me: mostly fruit, I think, with some old rose. Isfahan is reliably fragrant, I believe. It's a delicious old rose scent that's hard to find in a lot of other roses, IME. I have been surprised to find that Darlow's Enigma has some scent - unless I am smelling the nearby honeysuckle. The blossoms of the climber Rosanna are reliably, if subtly, redolent of green apples.
The foliage of the eglantine rose (R.rubiginosa) smells like green apples. Graham Thomas advocates growing it for this quality. On a still, foggy spring morning a plant will project its green apple fragrance through a small yard.
