New Roses for 2026

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In today’s newsletter podcast, Master Rosarian Debbie Arrington waxes rhapsodic about the new rose varieties that will be at nurseries in 2026.

In USDA Zone 9, those roses may already be available locally. If not, they’re usually available from rose catalogs. For paid subscribers, Debbie talks about 12 new rose varieties (it’s 6 varieties for free subscribers). Paid subscribers also have access here to the transcript of the podcast, which features pictures of all the roses as well as links to where you can find them online.

After the paywall (in the middle of the transcript, below), there are pictures and chat about 6 more new roses for 2026; and, Debbie has tips for bringing cut roses into the house, preserving their aromatic nature. Plus, tips for what to look for when shopping for roses.

Here’s the transcript of our conversation about 2026 roses with Debbie Arrington of the Sacramento Rose Society, along with pictures and links:

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Farmer Fred: I was looking up the term “shovel prune”, trying to find out its origin. If you’re a gardener, you may be familiar with the term shovel prune. It basically means to remove a plant, in a polite way. And the first time I heard it, it was from a rosarian. In fact, the only people I know who use the term shovel prune are rosarians. And so I figured, well, it must have some sort of rose background. But unfortunately, I hit too many dead ends. But I will just assume that shovel pruning is a Rosarian term, because you need to make room for all the new roses that are coming out right now. It’s a great habit to get into.

(FREDNOTE: This article is not quite the dead end for a definition for “shovel pruning”… and it’s entertaining!)

Rosarians love new roses. They love to try new roses. They love to smell them, as well. And one Rosarian has a nice bully pulpit here in the Sacramento area.

Debbie Arrington is a master rosarian with the Sacramento Rose Society. She knows her roses. She and Kathy Morrison publish, every day of the year, the Sacramento Digs Gardening newsletter that’s sent to your email inbox, if you’re a subscriber (it’s free). There’s a lot of good information in that. Even if you don’t live in Sacramento, you could open a free subscription to the Sacramento Digs Gardening newsletter and get all sorts of good gardening information.

For instance, in a recent newsletter, she talked about the new roses for 2026. This is similar to what automotive magazines publish for car enthusiasts every fall. Automotive fans love to see the new cars when they come out in the fall. Well, Rosarians are like that in January, which makes January the time for shovel pruning. Because you have to plant something else, something new, perhaps. So we’re going to find out what’s new for 2026. What has got the Rosarians a-flutter?

Let’s sell some roses here. Debbie Arrington, have you purchased any of these roses that we’re going to talk about?

Debbie Arrington: Not yet, but they are on my list. I have to figure out how much room I have to get some roses in. And you’re right about shovel pruning. It is the pruning of last resort when you’ve done everything you can to that rose and it still isn’t performing. It either has to move or has to go. And that’s how you do it, is you dig it out. As some Rosarians say, the way to make sure a rose has a better season is to just show it the shovel and somehow they’ll wake up and have a lot more growth that year.

(FREDNOTE: perhaps a more genteel expression than “shovel pruning” when approaching an offending rose is “shovel ready”.)

What happens is that over the years, a rosebush can lose its vitality and just start not performing as well as it should. And by losing its vitality, it atrophies. It gets less juice out to the end of its canes. It stops putting out new canes. And if it doesn’t put out new canes, then it will stop putting out roses. And a rosebush that doesn’t bloom is just a pile of thorns. So it’s time to move on to something else. And fortunately, there are still rose hybridizers and rose breeders and rose nurseries and people that are willing to grow new roses and introduce them. And the roses that we are getting now are brand new roses of 2026. We’re actually go back to 2016 or earlier when these roses were originally bred because it takes about 10 years for a rose to come to market after they first discover that seedling. So these roses have been in the works for a long time, but they all represent trends that have been going for most of this new century.

Farmer Fred: What are the common threads on the popular new roses? What are rose growers looking for?

Debbie Arrington: It’s like they say, everything old is new again. People want roses that smell like roses. They want roses that look like roses. And they want roses that have all those good traits, but in a very easy care format that doesn’t need spraying. In fact, doesn’t need much care at all. And roses naturally tend to be on the low water use side. You can get by with irrigation twice a month easily here in Sacramento, which is saying something for a water-wise plant. That’s the standard. If you can do that, then it’s drought tolerant. And these roses, the ones that are being introduced now, have very good foliage. It’s very clean, fungal-resistant, disease-resistant, and looking very pretty to frame those beautiful new blooms.

Farmer Fred: You pointed out in the newsletter that some now are even self-cleaning blooms, that no deadheading is needed. I find that hard to believe.

Debbie Arrington: But it works. And it’s particularly true of what they call the landscape roses and your low-growing ground cover or shrub roses. These plants just put out masses of blooms, hundreds of blooms at once. And to go through and deadhead that would be quite a chore to keep those going. So instead, what happens is the flowers die back to the little stem that holds it onto the end of the cane or where it comes out of the cane. And that just dries out, and then it just falls off. And it never forms any rose hips because of the way these flowers die back. And because they die back that way, it just drops off. And then a new bloom comes out of the next leaf, one down, from where that comes out. And so what ends up happening is these plants stay very short, under one foot tall, and they just keep putting on more and more blooms. So they’re just constantly covered with flowers. And they call them carpet roses because they form like a carpet of blooms along the ground.

Farmer Fred: So these landscape or ground cover roses, these carpet roses. This sounds like a rose that would do well in just about any part of the United States.

Debbie Arrington: Yes, it would. That’s part of their charm and their sell-ability is that they not only are very clean and easy care, but they’re also cold tolerant and heat tolerant. So they can do both extremes. A lot of these roses are hardy down to under 20 degrees, even colder. And then they also can tolerate temperatures in the 90 or over 100. So you’ve got this wide range of growing conditions and looking beautiful all through spring, summer, into fall.

Farmer Fred: So landscape roses are basically the Toyota or the Honda of the rose world. But when new rose introductions come out, it’s like cars. These new roses are the sports cars. They’re the big SUVs. They are roses that stand out. It’s the Hummers of the rose world, if you will, that we’re going to be talking about. I don’t see any landscape roses on this list.

Debbie Arrington: No because most of the landscape roses are sold by color and they’re a series of roses like one of the popular ones from Star roses is the Drift series and they form drifts of roses and they’re low growing carpet roses and they’re sold by color so there’s apricot Drift, pink Drift, yellow Drift, white Drift. Each one has a little bit of its own personality, like the apricot Drift, which I have, peach Drift and apricot Drift. The peach Drift has a much more ruffled flower to it, a semi-double, with about 12 petals. And the flower is small, about two inches across. But the plant is covered with just dozens and dozens of these blooms. So it just looks like this whole mound, you know, of roughly peach-like looking blooms, while the apricot one has a little bit more substance to the flower.

RUFFLED ROMANCE

Farmer Fred: Well, you said the magic word ruffled, and that is one of the roses that is included in the new rose introductions for 2026, Ruffled Romance. And this is a floribunda, and I guess we better define our terms here.

Debbie Arrington: Yes, yes. Because there’s lots of rose terminology that tends to confuse people. But we’ll break it down the easy way. Most people, when you think of roses, you think of the roses like you get from the florist. And those are hybrid teas. And a hybrid tea rose, generally they have a formal look to them with a high point in the middle. And they look the way people imagine a dozen red roses to look. That sort of formal look. Floribunda, on the other hand, those are like a bouquet on a stem. Instead of one stem, one flower, you have bunches of flowers together on that one stem. And the name floribunda comes from the Latin for abundance of flowers. So that’s where floribunda comes from. Floribundas also tend to be shorter plants, most of them. And hybrid teas typically will grow bushes that are four and a half to five feet tall, while most floribundas stay under three feet. There are several exceptions to that, but they tend to be lower growing. And because they have a growth structure where the stems are shorter and the leaves are closer together, the distance between nodes where the leaves come out or the blooms come out is much shorter. You can prune floribundas with a hedge clipper.

Because anywhere you cut them, it will be okay because there’s not much dieback on the stems. And they will produce lots and lots and lots of flowers. And floribundas also can grow in less space than a full-grown hybrid tea. So because of their shorter structure and less space requirements, they have become very popular with people with smaller gardens. And so floribundas are one of the areas where we’re seeing many more rose introductions, where in past years, oh, most of the new rose introductions that got people excited would be hybrid teas. Now, about half of them are floribundas.

Farmer Fred: Well, I bet a lot of people are wondering now, since it’s such a compact plant, I bet it could grow in a container. Would that be true?

Debbie Arrington: Oh, yes. They’re wonderful container roses, too.

Farmer Fred: And what size container is best for a floribunda?

Debbie Arrington: You want to have at least two square feet of space for the roots. Mostly you need space for the roots, more than anything. So I’d say at least a 12-inch pot is about as small as you could go with one of those. I have some in 12-inch containers and, oh, five-gallon pots. They grow well in. But if you put it in like a 10 or even a half wine barrel or something like that, they’ll be very happy forever.

Farmer Fred: I would want happy roses, so I’d put them all in barrels. Ruffled Romance is from Jackson and Perkins. And it’s a yellow blend.

Debbie Arrington: It’s a yellow blend, and it’s name is Ruffled Romance. It sounds like its name. It’s a very pretty, roughly yellow rose. It’s a golden yellow with little peach and pink accents on the edges of the bloom. It’s very cuppy looking. Instead of having a very pointed bloom, it has a very round, soft look to it. It’s extremely disease resistant and has a nice fragrance. The claim to fame on this is it’s the last rose that was created by the legendary hybridizer, Dr. Keith Zary. And he did hundreds and hundreds of roses, and this is the last one of his to come to market. And it’s being marketed by Jackson and Perkins, so that means it has a very wide footprint across the U.S., since they’re one of the major distributors as well as hybridizers.

Farmer Fred: Good-sized flowers.

Debbie Arrington: It’s nice flowers, too. They’re about four inches across, which is a good size for a floribunda. And when you consider that you’re having six to eight blooms all together on one stem, it does look like a bouquet on the stem.

Farmer Fred: I noticed that a lot of the roses we’ll be talking about claim strong disease resistance. And out here, that’s sort of a secondary concern because of our low humidity. But back east and in the Midwest and down South, yeah, you want good disease resistance.

Debbie Arrington: Oh, it’s huge. It’s huge. We’re spoiled in Sacramento in that we have ideal growing conditions for roses. As you said, that low humidity in the summer, that really helps. And also, when we hit 90 degrees, that kills most of the fungal diseases. So we don’t have the black spot and powdery mildew and rust that other parts of the country have. But places like Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi or any place in the Midwest or on the eastern seaboard that has those high summer humidity, it’s almost impossible to grow nice roses without a lot of spraying because the plant just becomes overwhelmed with these fungal diseases. So the hybridizers have really been focusing on strong disease resistance so you don’t need to spray. Because that’s one of the things that gardeners want to cut out of their gardening is any spraying. Because besides killing the fungal disease, you kill a lot of beneficial insects and other things too. So having that disease resistance is very important.

Farmer Fred: All right. So a lot of these will have disease resistance. And by the way, we’ll have pictures of all of these in the newsletter portion of the Beyond the Garden Basics. So if you’re wondering what they’re looking like, take a look at the newsletter, too, while you’re listening to the podcast.

SEALED WITH A KISS

Farmer Fred: A dark red hybrid tea rose from Jackson and Perkins is on the list for exciting new roses for 2026 called Sealed with a Kiss.

Debbie Arrington: And this is the best true dark red rose out of the class of ’26. It is near black. It has that velvety look to it. And it looks like a classic hybrid tea exhibition rose. It’s the type of rose that rose exhibitors like myself gravitate towards because it has what they call presence, particularly on the exhibition table. It’s one of those roses that across the room, you see it and you go, “wow!”. And that’s the kind of rose this is. For people that have other roses in their garden, it has the color of, it’s a little darker than a Mr. Lincoln, but it has a much more formal form to it. Sort of like, Veterans Honor or Olympiad. Those both have very pointy form to them. But it has very, very dark red velvety blooms. And it’s one of those, it has very long stems too. So it puts out nice three foot stems. So it makes a nice cut rose.

Farmer Fred: Is there such a thing as a black rose?

Debbie Arrington: Not yet.

Farmer Fred: All right. So for those of you planning a goth garden party, you may want to just settle for Sealed with a Kiss.

Debbie Arrington: Yes, yes. Well, there’s roses that look very, very, very dark red, but they’re not true black. They haven’t reached that yet. They haven’t come up with a true black, and they haven’t come up with a true blue either.

FLASH GORDON

Farmer Fred: All right. Another floribunda that’s on the list of good roses for 2026. It’s a semi-double floribunda, and Debbie will explain the semi-double to us, Flash Gordon.

Debbie Arrington: Flash Gordon has these big, bright pink blooms, and semi-double means it has about 12 to 16 petals. And how they came up with that is a single rose has six to eight petals. And so it looks, oh, It doesn’t look much like a rose. It has a very open look. Roses are, they’re related to apples and plums. So single roses tend to look like an apple blossom. And semi-double looks like, oh, more like a peach blossom, in that it has, you know, 12 to 16 petals instead. And the thing about Flash Gordon is it has really big golden stamens in the middle of the rose with a white eye around it. So it has this sort of flash, this chrome in the garden, where it looks sort of like, you know, look over here, you know, look at me. You know, it has this kind of flashiness that gardeners look for. But it also is something that pollinators look for. Because with those strong, stamens in the middle, it’s very bee-friendly. And it’s one of those roses that will bring a lot of bees into the garden.

Farmer Fred: It is a form of a pink bloom, a cerise pink. I’m not sure who cerise pink is, but what is cerise pink?

Debbie Arrington: Cerise pink is a certain color. It’s a very bright color. Oh, it’s almost hot pink.

Farmer Fred: Okay. I’ll go with that.

PENELOPE LIVELY

Farmer Fred: You know, when I said that earlier that there weren’t any shrub roses on this list, this next one is. It’s a shrub rose. It’s a medium pink shrub rose called Penelope Lively.

Debbie Arrington: Yes. Well, the Austin roses are all classified as shrub roses. And in this group of 12 new introductions that I put together, five of them are from the David Austin Rose Collection. And David Austin Roses, they originally started over in England. Their whole thing is to come up with roses that look like they could have been growing 200 years ago. They are really into Victorian-style roses. They’re great, big, giant cabbage roses. A typical hybrid tea rose has 25 to 40 petals. Most of the Austin roses have over 100 petals. And what happens is you’ve got a really big, fat, cabbage-style rose that’s huge, just huge on the plant, huge in the vase. Now, the thing that the problem with Austin roses that a lot of growers have is that the blooms are so heavy their necks break that if they get any rain on them, because they’re very cuppy style roses, they collect a lot of water inside the blooms,

Their little neck breaks right over because it doesn’t have enough substance in the stem to hold on to that big giant bloom. So the Austin folks have been working really hard on creating stronger stems so their beauties stay upright during inclement weather. The reason people gravitate towards Austin Roses besides the beauty of the flowers is because they have very heavy, well-developed fragrance. They are renowned for this perfume that the Austin Roses put out. And part of the reason they have such a heavy perfume is that in roses, fragrance is tied to petals. The fragrance is not inside the stamens. It’s at the base of each petal is where the little fragrance gland is, or the plant structure that would be a gland. It’s where it emits its perfume, its scent. It’s just at the base of the petal. So the more petals you have in a rose, the more likely that rose is to have a strong scent. And so the Austin Roses, with their scores of petals, they have this very heavy fragrance in the garden. And it’s a sort of fragrance that you can smell it across the garden. It’s so strong. And that one bloom in a vase can scent a whole room.

Farmer Fred: It is an interesting looking flower. It’s very complicated. It’s like looking at the June Taylor dancers from above.

Debbie Arrington: And you were talking about Penelope Lively. And that is a medium pink, a middle pink shrub rose that Austin introduced. It is a name for a writer who’s very popular in England. And the rose was originally introduced in England in 2023. And now they have enough to share with us here in America. And so we’re getting it too. And it has 120 petals per bloom. And the Austin Roses that we get here in the U.S. were grown out in Texas instead of in England. When they originally started marketing Austin Roses to the U.S., they were growing them out in England. And the plants were pretty small and used to really cold weather, and then they’d come over here to sunny California and more than double in size. They just got gigantic. And they found that by growing them out in Texas, they could acclimate them a lot more to conditions that they’d find here in North America, and that they stay about the same size as what they say they’re going to grow instead of becoming crazy big monsters. But Penelope Lively is a classic Austin Rose. And as they say, it will be an instant classic.

Farmer Fred: Now, you mentioned Texas as a growing ground. I’m very familiar with all the rose growing grounds in the southern San Joaquin Valley around Bakersfield and Wasco. Are there any other rose growing areas in the United States?

Debbie Arrington: Well, the big ones right now are Wasco and in Texas. Wasco is here in California, down near Bakersfield. There used to be a lot of production down in San Diego County, but most of that is now homes or grapes.

Farmer Fred: Oh, yeah.

Debbie Arrington: Because the same conditions that, grapes like, roses like.

Farmer Fred: Nothing in Arizona or Nevada?

Debbie Arrington: Oh, yes, there are some. There’s a bunch in Arizona. And in fact, a lot of the landscape roses are coming out of Arizona.

Farmer Fred: Okay. I would think so, just because of the sun, the heat, and the low humidity.

Debbie Arrington: Oh, yeah. The thing about getting a rose to market is it has to be somewhere for about three years before they dig them up and sell them to the public. So that rose has been around for quite a while.

QUEEN OF SWEDEN

Farmer Fred: All right. Queen of Sweden is next. That too is a David Austin rose, so I would imagine it has a good scent.

Debbie Arrington: Yes, it does. And it is a very, very light pink, just a blush of a pink. You know, it’s one of those creamy white with just a little cast of baby pink. It has a heavy myrrh scent and 140 petals per bloom. You know, so it’s a beautiful rose. What’s interesting about it is it is a rose that they had originally introduced in 2004. And then decided to take it back and improve it and give it more stability, stronger stems, and more disease resistance, and then reintroduce it again. And so it’s the same rose, only improved.

Farmer Fred: And it has, according to the literature with it, it has a heavy scent of m-y-r-r-h, a biblical spice if there ever was one.

Debbie Arrington: Yes. What’s so interesting about it is myrrh is one of the scents that a rose can smell like. Roses can smell like more than 20 different things, including smelling like a rose. So myrrh is one of those different variations of what a rose can smell like. And it’s a heavy, spicy scent, like perfume.

LARK ASCENDING

Farmer Fred: Next up is a rose, which to me is music. It’s the Lark Ascending. Which was a work by, I believe, by Ralph Vaughan Williams back in the 1880s or early 1900’s.

Debbie Arrington: Yes, it is. A beautiful violin piece. And this rose, it is a lovely light golden color. Again, it has that myrrh scent mixed in with more traditional tea rose scent. What’s interesting about this rose is it puts out these huge flowers, but in big clusters. And the clusters, you know, have 10, 12 blooms on one stem. And so again, it’s a bouquet in a vase and very, very popular already. It’s one that people are talking about.

Farmer Fred: But it’s not a floribunda.

Debbie Arrington: Oh no, it’s classified as a shrub rose. The thing about the Austin roses is they are all classified as shrub roses because of the breeding history of the roses.

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