News Release
A Magic Carpet Made of Roses
For Immediate Release
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Contact: Judie Brower, [email protected], (802) 447-3595
Roses are the queens of the garden. No other flower is as universally prized, and no other flower
is as celebrated as the rose. A rose bush in full bloom is the star of the landscape.
But roses can be fussy. They have a reputation as being a Goldilocks in the landscape. Conditions have to be just right—not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry. Sometimes caring
for a finicky rose bush involves lots of spraying, special care and prayer.
At least that’s the way it used to be 20 years ago. In 1995, a new kind of rose appeared in
American garden centers. It was called Flower Carpet®, and it was introduced as the first “eco-rose.”
Unlike the other fussy roses available to gardeners, the easycare Flower Carpet was disease and pest resistant. It seemed
to thrive on neglect, and it didn’t need to be sprayed with
fungicides to battle diseases such as blackspot and powdery
mildew, or sprayed with pesticides to kill insect pests.
Flower Carpet Pink, the first Flower Carpet rose to be
introduced, boasted a profusion of bright, carmine pink blossoms. The plant seemed to bloom nonstop, with a flowering
season that could easily last for five months or more. The
flowers were framed against the plant’s rich, glossy green
foliage, which could stay on the plant all year long in warmer
climates. Once the plant got established, it was remarkably
Flower Carpet® Pink from Tesselaar
drought tolerant —and tolerant to road salts in colder climates.
Plants was introduced to American
But that wasn’t all. Flower Carpet roses didn’t need
gardeners in 1995.
fancy pruning, and they only needed to be cut back once
each spring to keep the plant vibrant and healthy. Its growth habit kept the plant lower and more
spread out that the typical rose bush, so a thriving, blooming Flower Carpet rose bush looked like
a magic carpet made of roses.
The Marketing Genius Behind the Miracle Plant
The original Flower Carpet rose was developed by Werner Noack, a plant breeder in Germany,
in the late 1980s. At first this new variety was called Heidetraum, until a marketing genius from
Australia named Anthony Tesselaar devised a unique strategy to bring it to market as the first globally branded rose.
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A Magic Carpet Made
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“The plant was phenomenal, and a rose this distinctive deserved an equally distinctive marketing
strategy,” said Anthony Tesselaar, president of Anthony Tesselaar International. “We trademarked the
Flower Carpet name, and we began to use branding
techniques to create awareness and communicate the
value that Flower Carpet roses brought to gardens
and landscapes.”
One of the cornerstones of the Flower Carpet
branding was the plant pot itself. Back then, a shopper at a garden center was greeted by row after row
of black plastic pots that looked exactly the same.
But each Flower Carpet rose came in an easy-to-find
bright pink pot bearing a distinctive Flower Carpet
logo. Instead of a small, plain plant tag, the Flower
Anthony Tesselaar holds a potted Flower Carpet
Carpet Rose tag was a large, full-color instructional Pink rose. When the plant was introduced 20 years
booklet that sat atop a patented clip-on stake that ago, it was a gardening sensation.
would flutter in a breeze to call attention to itself.
“The presentation was groundbreaking, and so was the plant,” said Tesselaar.
Flower Carpet Pink was a gardening sensation. The “no spraying, no dusting, no kidding” environmental rose changed an entire plant category—and began to forever change the way plants
were marketed and sold.
New Varieties, New Colors
When gardeners planted the new Flower Carpet Pink rose, they were rewarded with garden
performance as good or better as the advance publicity promised. The rose bushes really were
tough-as-nails in the yard. The flowers were bright and prolific, and they even dropped their petals
neatly instead of leaving ugly clumps on the bush.
The worldwide success of Flower Carpet Pink was followed by the introduction of additional
Flower Carpet roses with different-colored flowers. In
1997, Flower Carpet White was introduced, and the
very next year Flower Carpet Apple Blossom, a pale
pink variety, became available to American gardeners.
New colors continued to be introduced every few years
to broaden the Flower Carpet color palette.
To date, 10 different Flower Carpet roses have
been introduced, and gardeners continue to buy them
every spring. The growing Flower Carpet family of
Flower Carpet Scarlet was introduced in 2007.
roses has received an impressive list of international
This “second generation” of Flower Carpet roses
was bred for even better hardiness, heat tolerance awards for beauty, garden performance and natural
and humidity tolerance.
disease resistance. Flower Carpet roses have earned
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Outstanding Performance in the Garden
The most important aspect of Flower Carpet roses is their performance in gardens throughout
the world—year after year. If Flower Carpet rose bushes didn’t continue to look great in a front
yard or backyard garden, all of the prestigious awards and accolades would mean nothing.
A Flower Carpet rose bush can be planted
almost anywhere in the landscape. Like other
roses, it thrives in full sun, so its dark green
leaves and prolific blooms look great in a
sunny garden bed or in front of a garden wall
or a fence. But unlike a typical rose bush, a
Flower Carpet bush will also bloom in partial
sun when planted under a tree.
Traditional rose bushes are famous for
the meticulous pruning that they require each
year to coax the plant into full blossom. But
sometimes it seems as though a Flower Carpet rose thrives on neglect and mistreatment.
Prune off one-third of its growth in the spring, A cottage garden featuring Flower Carpet roses.
and it will bloom magnificently. Forget to
prune it all together or accidently run over it with a lawnmower, and the next year it looks healthy
and vigorous, and it’s covered with colorful, multi-petaled blossoms once again.
What makes this rose so special is its ability to thrive without much fertilizer or pest-control
chemicals. That makes a Flower Carpet rose an ideal choice for inter-planting with vegetables, herbs
or flowers that attract beneficial pollinators. Its natural, low-growing habit also makes it ideal for
erosion control on slopes or as a groundcover in hard-to-access areas in a landscape. The newest
varieties, often called the “Next Generation” of Flower Carpet roses—including Scarlet, Amber,
Pink Supreme and Pink Splash, have all been bred for even stronger heat and humidity tolerance.
“It has been my experience that you can’t beat the Flower Carpets for hands-off landscaping
and long-term color,” said Dean Fosdick, a respected garden writer for Associated Press.
Another influential garden writer and plant expert agrees. “Flower Carpet roses…changed how
gardeners feel about roses,” said Stephanie Cohen, co-author of The Nonstop Garden. “They went
from high-care, being fussy and lots of work, to being a gardener’s best friend.”
That, in a nutshell, is why more than 80 million Flower Carpet roses have been sold since the
US introduction of Flower Carpet Pink in 1995. That’s a lot of pink pots, and there’s no end in sight.
For more information about the family of Flower Carpet roses and the colors that are available,
visit www.tesselaar.com/plants/flower-carpet-roses/
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28 top honors including Gold Medals from competitions in The Hauge (Holland), the Royal Horticultural Society (England) and the Horticultural Journalists’ Association (Paris, France)—and six
ADR Rose Awards from the All Deutschland Rose trials in Germany, which is widely considered
to be the world’s toughest test of rose performance.