Coming up roses The Brindabella is a winner

A husband-and-wife team in country Queensland has just won the equivalent of the Olympics in the rose-growing world.

John and Sylvia Gray live quietly, surrounded by a flower-filled country garden, near Toowoomba in Queensland. It’s been both home and business for the past 30 years. Yet this modest couple are stars on the world stage of rose breeders, having recently won an unprecedented trifecta of awards at what might be called the Olympics of garden rose trials.

One of their roses, ‘Purple Prince’ (pictured), was a winner at the 2020/21 American Rose Trials for Sustainability, perhaps the most demanding garden rose trial ever established. Next, it won at the American Garden Rose Selections Trials 2021 and also won a Fragrance award, one of only six ever given. It beat entries from all the famed rose breeders in France, Germany and England and confirms the Grays’ belief that this is a garden rose that anyone can grow almost anywhere. “It has all the worthy traits we were looking for to meet the needs of gardeners from Geelong to Cairns, plus a modern colour and a fragrance that is frankly astonishing,” says John. In Australia, this rose is sold as ‘Brindabella Pride’.

John’s background as an agronomist and his interest in crop genetics gave him the knowledge to draw from, but the drive for breeding fragrant, fuss-free roses, came from wanting to give customers good plants. He and Sylvia established a retail nursery on the 2-hectare site they bought in the early 1990s, making a garden for themselves but also planting display gardens for the nursery. At an altitude of 720 metres, they’re on the margins of a cool climate, which lets them grow a huge range of plants including, of course, roses.

“But as I added more roses, the problem of black spot quickly became obvious,” says John of the fungal disease that afflicts most roses, especially in humid areas, causing black splotches and defoliation. The breakthrough came in 1999 when he found a rose with beautiful fragrance and incredible resistance to black spot. “It stood out like a beacon,” John recalls. “It was a bushy, rounded shrub and never had a mark on it. We knew what we were looking at and what it meant.” They released it in the early 2000s as ‘Brindabella Bouquet’, a prolific, repeat-flowering cream rose, and went on to use it as the ‘stud parent’ of their breeding program.

It has great vigour, allowing its progeny to be grown on their own roots rather than being grafted as so many roses are.

Each year, John and Sylvia make hundreds of crosses between selected roses, taking the pollen from one flower to the ovary of another. “Sylvia has an unbelievable knack for this because she has such dextrous, artist’s fingers,” says John admiringly. They sow the seeds from the resulting rose hips in October, which germinate through summer into autumn and amazingly grow quickly enough to flower the following spring. The best are selected and trialled over several years, resulting in perhaps six varieties being judged good enough to release to the public each year. “We want to produce fragrant and beautiful garden roses that flower well and retain their foliage right through the growing season,” says John.

“They can change the perception of roses being difficult.”

The Brindabella range, now extending to about 50 varieties, includes roses for shadier spots, hot regions and for pots. There’s also the fascinating Tiger series with striped and variegated blooms, on which no two petals are identical.

The pandemic meant their lovely garden and nursery was closed to visitors but John and Sylvia hope to reopen this spring for pre-booked tours. However, rose sales have boomed over the past year, despite the move to online sales only. “The awards have really given an impetus to sales here and in the US,” says John, who has licensed growers for the overseas markets.

There will be more new roses to come from the pair. “You get the bug,” says John, laughing. “We talk all the time about what we might create because there’s two of us – it’s very much a partnership.”

Brindabella Country Gardens, Toowoomba, Queensland; (07) 4696 8440 or brindabella-gardens.com.au.