From Empress Joséphine to Kate Moss — How Britain's Greatest Garden Show Became the Home of the Commemorative Rose
Introduction: A Garden of Names
Every May, in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London, something remarkable happens. Among the show-stopping garden designs, the towering lupins, the prize-winning dahlias and the breathless scent of ten thousand blooms competing for attention, some of the most quietly significant events at the world's most famous flower show are also the most personal. A new rose appears — or an iris, a clematis, a dahlia — and it bears a name the world already knows. A monarch. A ballerina. A rock legend. A fashion icon. A scientist who changed medicine. A botanist who changed gardens forever.
The tradition of naming flowers after notable people is as old as horticulture itself. It stretches back to the courts of ancient Rome, where poets wrote of roses sacred to Venus, and carries through the passionate obsessions of Napoleonic France, the plant-hunting expeditions of the Victorian era, and the commercial ingenuity of twentieth-century nurseries, arriving finally in the twenty-first century with a full head of steam. At the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, more than anywhere else in the world, this tradition is given its grandest annual stage. Every year, the great rose breeders, the specialist growers, the dauntless clematis cultivators and the visionary dahlia enthusiasts gather in the Great Pavilion and on the showground to unveil their latest creations — and a significant portion of those creations wear the names of the famous, the beloved, the admired and the commemorated.
In 2026, the latest chapter of this story was written by Peter Beales Roses of Norfolk, who unveiled a rose called Kate Moss — a lemon-to-cream shrub rose bred over several years of patient development, which made its public debut at the show and was entered into the prestigious Plant of the Year competition. The supermodel herself, photographed holding the rose in her garden, said that having a flower named after her felt "beautifully strange," conjuring the idea of blooming quietly in someone's garden. It is a sentiment that captures the essence of the tradition perfectly: the strange, touching immortality of having your name attached to something that will flower again and again, season after season, in gardens across the country and the world.
This guide sets out to explore that tradition in full — its origins, its mechanisms, its major practitioners, and above all the extraordinary individuals whose names have been attached to flowers launched at or associated with the Chelsea Flower Show throughout its history. We will travel from the rose breeders of nineteenth-century Yorkshire to the sunlit nurseries of Shropshire, from the dahlia fields of Holland to the clematis trails of the Home Counties, stopping to examine the flowers themselves — their colours, their fragrances, their growing habits — and the lives of the remarkable people they honour.
Part One: The History of Naming Flowers After People
The Ancient Roots of Floral Commemoration
Long before the Chelsea Flower Show existed, long before the Royal Horticultural Society had been conceived, the practice of associating specific plants with specific individuals was already deeply embedded in human culture. The Greeks and Romans named plants for gods and heroes: the hyacinth, legend tells us, sprang from the blood of the youth Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo and accidentally killed by a discus thrown by the god himself. The narcissus commemorated another beautiful youth, Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection and was transformed into a flower. These mythological namings carried profound emotional weight — they were expressions of grief, of love, of transformation, and of the desire to make something beautiful and permanent from loss.
As botany developed into a more systematic science during the Renaissance and beyond, the naming of plants after people took on a different character. The Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature, formalised by Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, encoded the practice into the very structure of scientific plant taxonomy. Botanical genera and species were routinely named after the botanists, explorers, and patrons who discovered or funded the discovery of new species. The fuchsia was named for the German botanist Leonhart Fuchs. The dahlia commemorated the Swedish botanist Anders Dahl, a student of Linnaeus. The gardenia honoured the Scottish-American naturalist Alexander Garden. The zinnia preserved the name of the German botanist Johann Gottfried Zinn. The magnolia carried the name of the French botanist Pierre Magnol. In each case, the naming was a form of scientific tribute — a way of acknowledging contribution, of weaving individual achievement into the permanent fabric of the living world.
The tradition of naming cultivated varieties — as opposed to species — after notable individuals developed somewhat later and along somewhat different lines. It emerged most powerfully in the world of rose breeding, where the proliferation of new varieties from the late eighteenth century onwards created both the need and the opportunity for distinctive names. The great French nurseries of the early nineteenth century — Vibert, Laffay, Miellez, Prevost — named their roses after the aristocracy, the military, the royal family, and occasionally after the breeders themselves. The cult of Empress Joséphine Bonaparte, who created the legendary rose garden at Malmaison and is credited with inspiring much of the early passion for rose collecting among the French elite, gave her name to a celebrated Gallica rose variety. When Joséphine died in 1814, the grief of the horticultural world was expressed, among other ways, in floral commemoration.
The fashion for naming roses after people spread to Britain during the Victorian era, when rose cultivation became a national obsession and the great nurseries of the age competed to create ever more elaborate and beautifully named varieties. By the end of the nineteenth century, as Roger Mann observed in his book Naming the Rose, over thirty thousand new rose varieties had been introduced — the vast majority of them now lost to history, but many of them bearing the names of real people. Queen Victoria herself was honoured with multiple rose varieties. So were members of her family, her courtiers, her generals, and, in a nod to commercial pragmatism, the wives and daughters of the nursery owners who bred the roses. The line between horticultural tribute and marketing strategy was always a fine one.
Jackson and Perkins and the Dorothy Perkins Revolution
The single rose variety that is most often cited as marking the beginning of the modern commercial tradition of naming roses after famous people is, in fact, named after someone almost nobody outside her family had ever heard of. Dorothy Perkins, introduced by the American nursery Jackson and Perkins in 1901, was named after the granddaughter of one of the company's owners. She was not, in any conventional sense, a celebrity. But the rose that bore her name was a sensation. Its vigorous, cascading growth, its clusters of small pink flowers, and its extraordinary ease of cultivation made it one of the most popular roses in the world within a decade of its introduction. When it won a prize at the Royal National Rose Society in 1908, Dorothy Perkins — both the person and the plant — became famous overnight. The lesson was not lost on the nursery trade: a memorable name attached to an outstanding plant could become enormously powerful commercial currency.
The Chelsea Flower Show and the Culture of the Named Variety
The Chelsea Flower Show, which held its first edition at the Royal Hospital grounds in 1913 (though its direct predecessor, the Great Spring Show, had been running since 1862), quickly became the premier launching pad for new plant varieties in Britain. The show's combination of horticultural expertise, royal patronage, media attention, and aspirational social cachet made it the ideal venue for introducing plants that were meant to be not just beautiful but significant — plants that carried weight, that told a story, that honoured something or someone worth honouring.
For the great rose breeders in particular — companies like Harkness, founded in Yorkshire in 1879; David Austin, established in Shropshire in the late 1950s; and Peter Beales, based in Norfolk — Chelsea became the annual moment of revelation, the occasion on which new varieties could be unveiled to the world's press, admired by royalty, and scrutinised by thousands of passionate gardeners. And for varieties with famous names attached, the show provided something uniquely valuable: the chance for the celebrity themselves to attend, to be photographed with the flower that bore their name, to say something memorable about the experience, and to generate the kind of publicity that no advertising budget could replicate.
The mechanics of commissioning a named rose are more complex and time-consuming than most people realise. A modern rose variety typically takes seven to ten years from the initial cross-pollination to commercial introduction. The breeder must select two parent plants, make the cross, grow the resulting seedlings, evaluate them over many years for health, disease resistance, flower quality, fragrance, colour stability, and garden performance, then select the best from perhaps tens of thousands of candidates. Only when a variety has been through this rigorous process is it considered ready for naming and introduction. The name itself — especially if it is a famous name — must be negotiated and agreed with the individual or their representatives, who will naturally want to know that the variety being named after them is of sufficient quality to reflect well on their reputation. As the world of celebrity rose launches has grown more sophisticated, some individuals have become famously particular about what they will allow to bear their name.
Part Two: The Great Breeders and Their Approach to Naming
David Austin Roses: Poetry, Literature, and the Occasional Legend
Of all the rose breeders associated with the Chelsea Flower Show, none has a more storied relationship with the event than David Austin Roses of Albrighton in Shropshire. David Charles Henshaw Austin, born in 1926 and died in 2018, was one of the most consequential figures in twentieth-century horticulture — a largely self-taught breeder who spent six decades creating what he called English Roses: varieties that combined the form, fragrance, and romantic character of old garden roses with the repeat-flowering habit and disease resistance of modern varieties.
Austin's first rose, Constance Spry, was introduced in 1961. Its name was carefully chosen. Constance Spry was a real and remarkable person — a British florist, author, and educator who had been commissioned to arrange the flowers for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 and who had devoted years to the promotion and cultivation of antique roses. Naming his first rose after her was not merely a commercial gesture; it was a statement of values, an alignment of his new creation with a tradition of floral artistry and a particular vision of English horticulture.
The naming of Austin's roses continued in this vein for decades. Many were named after literary figures — characters from Chaucer, Hardy, and Shakespeare — and others after real historical personages who had contributed to gardening or culture more broadly. But the most significant named rose in the early history of the company, the one that Austin himself credited with transforming his commercial fortunes and cementing the reputation of the English Rose, was one named after a friend.
Graham Thomas: The Rose That Changed Everything
In 1983, at the Chelsea Flower Show, David Austin presented three new English Roses. One of them was Rosa Graham Thomas, a luminous, deep butter-yellow variety with a strong tea fragrance and the characteristic cupped, many-petalled form that Austin had been developing for over two decades. The response from press and public was extraordinary. Graham Thomas became one of the most celebrated roses of the twentieth century — twice voted among the UK's favourite garden roses, inducted into the World Federation of Rose Societies' Hall of Fame in 2009, and still widely grown and admired decades after its introduction.
The man for whom it was named was no celebrity in the conventional sense, but he was a giant of the horticultural world. Graham Stuart Thomas (1909-2003) was one of the most influential plantsmen of the twentieth century: a garden designer, author, artist, and above all a passionate advocate for old garden roses at a time when modern hybrid teas had almost completely supplanted them. He served for many years as Gardens Adviser to the National Trust, shaping the planting of scores of great historic gardens, and he wrote definitive books on old roses that helped rescue dozens of rare varieties from near-extinction. He was Austin's friend, mentor, and inspiration — and it was arguably appropriate that the rose named after him should be the one that secured Austin's own legacy.
The Graham Thomas rose embodies something important about how the tradition works at its best: the name and the flower should illuminate each other. Graham Thomas the man was associated with richness, warmth, scholarship, and an almost missionary passion for the beauty of old roses. The rose that bears his name is rich, warm, golden, and deeply fragrant — a variety that, in its appearance and character, feels like an embodiment of everything the real Graham Thomas stood for.
Gertrude Jekyll: The Greatest Garden Designer and Her Immortal Rose
If Graham Thomas was the rose that made David Austin's name, Gertrude Jekyll was the variety that eventually achieved the highest possible international recognition. Introduced in 1986, Rosa Gertrude Jekyll is a vigorous, strongly fragrant English Rose with large, deep pink, rosette-shaped blooms and a powerful old rose scent. In 2025, it was named the World's Favourite Rose by the World Federation of Rose Societies — one of the highest honours in the global rose world — making it the second David Austin rose to receive the accolade, following Graham Thomas.
Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) was perhaps the most celebrated garden designer in British history. Working in close collaboration with architect Edwin Lutyens, she created hundreds of gardens in the Arts and Crafts tradition, developing a distinctive approach to planting that emphasised the artistic use of colour, texture, and seasonal succession. Her books — Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden, Wall and Water Gardens, Lilies for English Gardens, and many others — remain in print and in use more than a century after they were written. She was a passionate rose grower and grew many old varieties at her home, Munstead Wood in Surrey, which she designed herself.
The Jekyll rose is one of the most widely planted English Roses in existence. Its combination of extraordinary fragrance — Austin described it as the definitive English Rose scent — with vigorous health, repeat flowering, and the romantic, full-petalled form of an old garden rose made it irresistible to gardeners and rose enthusiasts worldwide. That it bears the name of the woman who did more than almost anyone else to define the English garden aesthetic seems entirely appropriate: both the woman and the rose represent the highest expression of a particular vision of natural beauty, artfully composed.
Darcey Bussell: The Ballerina Rose
One of the most beloved of the David Austin roses named after a living person was Darcey Bussell, introduced in 2006. Named after the highly acclaimed British ballerina Dame Darcey Bussell — principal dancer with the Royal Ballet from 1989 to 2007 and one of the most celebrated figures in British ballet — the rose is a compact, repeat-flowering English shrub rose with deep crimson-pink blooms. As the petals age, they take on a touch of mauve before they drop — a quality that Austin described as particularly beautiful. The fragrance is light to medium and fruity.
The naming of this rose after a ballerina was fitting in a way that went beyond mere association. The rose's blooms, in their early stages, have a tight, nested quality — a formal precision of petal arrangement — that then opens and softens as the flower matures, in a way that invites comparison to the discipline and eventual freedom of a dancer's performance. Whether Austin intended this parallel is unclear, but it speaks to the way the best flower namings work: they create a resonance between the person and the plant that enriches both.
The Darcey Bussell rose has since been retired from the David Austin collection — a reminder that even the most beloved named varieties can eventually be superseded by newer, healthier, or more garden-worthy alternatives as breeding science advances. The name, however, remains associated in many gardeners' minds with one of the most graceful rose varieties they have ever grown.
Judi Dench: The Apricot Treasure
The Chelsea Flower Show in 2017 provided one of the show's most warmly received moments when Dame Judi Dench appeared at the David Austin Roses stand to see for the first time the rose that had been created in her honour. Rosa Dame Judi Dench (given the botanical code name Ausquaker) is an English shrub rose with mid-sized, pastel orange rosette blooms and a pleasant tea fragrance, presented in attractive clusters. The eighty-two-year-old actress described it as "very healthy, but with rather a laid-back quality" — a remark that delighted the horticultural press and perfectly captured the affectionate, gently self-deprecating character she is known for.
Dame Judi Dench is, by any measure, one of the most celebrated actors in British history. Her career spans decades of distinguished theatre and film work, from her celebrated Shakespearean roles at the RSC and the National Theatre to her iconic portrayal of M in the James Bond franchise and her Oscar-winning performance in Shakespeare in Love. She is a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and has received virtually every major award in British acting. The rose named after her was created to reflect her stature: its vigorous health, its resistance to rain damage (a quality noted by Austin's breeders with particular care), and its warm, apricot colour were all chosen to suggest someone both robust and beautiful, both enduring and warm.
Elizabeth: In Memoriam of a Queen
In 2022, David Austin Roses created a rose called Elizabeth — specifically Rosa Elizabeth (Ausmajesty) — as a memorial to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Released as part of the Coronation Collection in anticipation of the coronation of King Charles III, the Elizabeth rose is a stunning creation: large ruffled rosettes in a delicate blush pink, with a sweet scent described as combining Old Rose fragrance with notes of lemon sherbet. It was showcased at the Chelsea Flower Show that year.
The naming of a rose after Elizabeth II was simply the latest in a long tradition. The Queen was a passionate flower lover and a frequent attendee at Chelsea — she attended almost every show after her coronation in 1953, becoming a patron of the RHS and one of the show's most enthusiastic and knowledgeable visitors. Several roses had borne her name during her lifetime, the most famous being the grandiflora Queen Elizabeth rose created by the American breeder Walter Lammerts for her coronation in 1953 — one of the most planted rose varieties in the world. The David Austin memorial rose of 2022 was a more intimate tribute, created specifically in the context of approaching the end of a reign of extraordinary length and consequence.
The King's Rose, unveiled at the 2025 Chelsea Flower Show by David Austin Roses, continued this royal tradition. King Charles III and Queen Camilla attended the show in 2025, with the Queen holding roses named The King's Rose — a deep, fragrant variety developed in support of The King's Foundation, the charitable organisation founded by Charles to advance his values around sustainability, traditional craftsmanship, and education.
Part Three: Harkness Roses and the Art of the Celebrity Launch
A Yorkshire Dynasty
While David Austin represents perhaps the most artistically sophisticated approach to naming roses after people, the Harkness family of Hitchin, Hertfordshire represents something equally important: longevity, consistency, and a deep commitment to the idea that roses should be named after people who matter to the public. Founded in 1879 by brothers John and Robert Harkness in Bedale, Yorkshire, the company has operated continuously for nearly a century and a half, winning over twenty-five gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show and creating some of the most loved varieties in British gardening.
The Harkness family's relationship with royalty and celebrity began almost at the company's founding. Queen Victoria purchased her roses from Harkness and Sons in the 1890s. The legendary garden designer Gertrude Jekyll was a prominent Harkness customer throughout her career. The association with the great and the good became part of the company's identity, and as the twentieth century progressed, it was formalised into a practice of naming roses after individuals who represented specific values or causes the company wished to celebrate.
The Harkness approach to naming tends to be somewhat different from David Austin's. While Austin most often named his roses after figures from history, literature, or horticulture, Harkness has been more willing to embrace living celebrities — actors, musicians, television presenters, sportspeople — whose names can drive immediate commercial recognition and, often, charitable associations.
The Princess of Wales: A Name That Lasted
Among the most significant roses in the Harkness portfolio is the Princess of Wales, bred by Robert Harkness (son of Jack Harkness) and associated with Diana, Princess of Wales. Diana's name became attached to an extraordinary range of plants and flowers in the years following her death in 1997, reflecting the depth and breadth of public grief and the desire to create something lasting and beautiful in her memory. Harkness created a cluster-flowering floribunda in white — a colour Diana was famously associated with — that bloomed profusely and brought elegance to any border. The rose captured something of Diana's quality: accessible, beautiful, generous in its flowering, and associated with a kind of unpretentious grace.
The connection between Harkness and the royal family was further cemented by the fact that the company's Mountbatten rose — a strong, healthy yellow floribunda created by Jack Harkness — was included in the wedding bouquet of Princess Diana when she married Prince Charles in 1981. This gave the company a unique and permanent place in the history of one of the most watched events of the twentieth century: their flower was present at the moment the world watched.
Catherine's Rose: A Modern Princess and Her Flower
In 2025, Harkness created Catherine's Rose in honour of Catherine, Princess of Wales — Kate Middleton — at the Chelsea Flower Show. The variety is a floribunda in mid-to-dark rose pink, delivering the disease resistance and abundant flowering that modern gardeners demand, with a remarkable mango-scented perfume providing an unexpected and delightful twist. Clusters of up to fifteen blooms create a spectacular show through the summer season.
The timing of the rose's launch — 2025 — was particularly poignant, coming after a period during which Catherine had been undergoing treatment for cancer and had been largely absent from public life. The rose, with its extraordinary health, resilience, and profusion of bloom, seemed almost to embody the public's collective hope for her recovery. The Princess herself did not attend the show that year, but her name above a stand of beautiful, vigorously healthy pink roses was a statement of affection that needed no elaboration.
The Queen Elizabeth II Rose: A Platinum Tribute
For Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee in 2022, Harkness created an official commemorative rose: the Queen Elizabeth II Rose, a hybrid tea with big, picturesque flowers that melt through shades of soft pink, light amber, and cream, releasing a strong rose scent. The variety was selected by the Queen herself as the official commemorative flower of her Platinum Jubilee, making it perhaps the most personally authorised royal rose since the coronation Queen Elizabeth rose of 1953.
Harkness had previous form in this regard. For the Queen Mother's 90th birthday in 1990, a pale pink rose had been created that opened out fully into side flowers with a gentle, refined scent — a variety as elegant and enduring as its namesake. The Duke of Edinburgh Rose, bred by Harkness after Prince Philip's death in April 2021, was a deep pink variety rippled with delicate white lines, presented to the Queen by the RHS president Keith Weed as a commemorative tribute to Prince Philip's lifetime of public service.
The Elton John AIDS Foundation Rose: Music, Colour, and Charity
One of the most celebrated new roses at the 2025 Chelsea Flower Show was the Elton John AIDS Foundation Rose, created by Harkness. The variety is a hybrid tea with a pearly pink hue that intensifies to cherry blossom tones, releasing a melon fragrance of unusual distinction. For every rose bush sold, Harkness committed to donating proceeds to the Elton John AIDS Foundation, connecting the commercial success of the variety directly to the charitable cause the rock legend has championed for decades.
Sir Elton John, born Reginald Kenneth Dwight in 1947 in Pinner, Middlesex, is one of the most successful musicians in history — a pianist, singer, songwriter, and performer whose career has spanned more than five decades and produced a catalogue of songs that have become an indelible part of the popular culture of the English-speaking world. But beyond his music, Elton John is also known for his philanthropy, particularly his work on behalf of AIDS charities since the epidemic of the 1980s. His foundation has raised hundreds of millions of pounds for HIV prevention, treatment, and support services around the world.
The appearance of the grand piano decked with roses in Harkness's Chelsea display — noted by Country Life's Chelsea correspondents — made for one of the show's most unexpectedly theatrical moments. Here was a rose that carried not just a name but a cause, connecting the traditions of Chelsea to the living, urgent world of global health. The pearly pink hue that deepens to cherry blossom seems, in retrospect, entirely appropriate for a man whose music has always combined glamour with depth, spectacle with sincerity.
Lynda Bellingham: A Tribute to a Television Treasure
Among the more personal namings in the Harkness catalogue is the Lynda Bellingham rose — light pink to amber orange blooms with scores of petals and a delightful fragrance, first growing in a blush pink shade before opening to reveal intricately shaped flowers with a deeper peach shading at the middle. Lynda Bellingham (1948-2014) was one of the best-loved faces on British television, an actress and presenter who appeared in Doctor Who, All Creatures Great and Small, Soldier Soldier, and — perhaps most memorably for many British viewers — in a long-running series of Oxo advertisements that made her a household face across two decades. She was also known as a panellist on Loose Women and for the profound dignity with which she faced and discussed her terminal illness in the final year of her life.
The Bellingham rose, with its warmth and generosity of bloom, its unpretentious beauty, and the way its colour evolves and deepens as it opens — starting pink and revealing a complex, layered amber-peach within — suggests an affectionate attempt to capture something of its namesake's warm, multifaceted character.
The Captain Tom Rose: Lockdown Hero in Bloom
Perhaps no named rose in recent Harkness history captured the national mood quite as precisely as The Captain Tom Rose, introduced in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Captain Sir Tom Moore (1920-2021) became one of the most universally beloved figures in Britain during the lockdown of 2020, when, at the age of ninety-nine, he walked one hundred laps of his garden to raise funds for NHS charities. The public's response was overwhelming: he raised over thirty-two million pounds, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in a private ceremony, and was made an honorary Colonel of the Army Foundation College.
The rose named in his honour by Harkness is, fittingly, one of remarkable resilience and cheerful vigour — a variety with the same dogged, cheerful determination to keep going that characterised Captain Tom's famous walk. The choice of a rose to honour him speaks to something deep about British commemorative culture: that there is no more fitting tribute to someone who gave joy and raised hope than a flower that will go on blooming, year after year, in the gardens of the people he inspired.
John Ystumllyn: Recovering a Lost History
Among the most historically significant named roses in the Harkness portfolio is the John Ystumllyn Rose, introduced in 2021. John Ystumllyn (c.1736-1786) was an African-born man who was brought to Wales as a child — some accounts suggest he may have arrived as a kidnapped child, though the full circumstances remain unclear — and became an extraordinarily skilled gardener at the Ystumllyn estate in Gwynedd, North Wales. He is one of the earliest Black individuals in Welsh history whose name and story are recorded in any detail.
Ystumllyn became famous throughout the region for his horticultural skills, his warm character, and his musical abilities. He married a local woman named Margaret Gruffydd and had a family in the area. His story, largely forgotten for two centuries, was recovered and publicised by genealogists and historians in the early twenty-first century as part of a broader project of recovering African and Black British history. The Harkness rose — producing refreshing yellow roses on dark, glossy foliage, robust and disease-resistant — was created as a contribution to that recovery project, an acknowledgement that horticultural history, like all history, has excluded voices and figures that deserve to be remembered.
The John Ystumllyn Rose represents something new in the tradition of named roses: a conscious effort to use the commemorative power of the named variety not simply to honour the famous, but to recover the forgotten, to give permanent, living form to a name that history had almost erased.
Dame Deborah James: A Rose for Bowelbabe
At the 2022 Chelsea Flower Show — the same show that saw the launch of Harkness's Queen Elizabeth II commemorative rose — the company also launched the Dame Deborah James Rose, named after the journalist, podcaster, and cancer campaigner who had spent five years living with and writing with remarkable openness about her stage four bowel cancer. Dame Deborah James (1981-2022), known to her huge following by the nickname Bowelbabe, raised over forty-seven million pounds for cancer research in the final weeks of her life through her Bowelbabe Fund, and was made a Dame by Prince William in a private ceremony weeks before her death.
The rose created by Harkness in her honour was a fitting tribute: vibrantly coloured, abundantly flowering, and associated with a charitable fundraising mission that made its commercial success directly meaningful. The launch at Chelsea was one of the most emotionally resonant of recent years — a show already heavy with the anticipation of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee made heavier still by the awareness that Deborah James was critically ill, and that the flower would outlast her.
Part Four: Peter Beales Roses and the Kate Moss Story
A Norfolk Dynasty
Peter Beales Roses, based in Attleborough in Norfolk, is one of the most respected rose nurseries in the world — a company with a particular speciality in old garden roses, heritage varieties, and climbing roses, and a distinguished record at the Chelsea Flower Show that by 2025 extended to thirty consecutive gold medals. Founded by Peter Beales himself (1936-2013), a man who devoted his life to the collection, preservation, and promotion of historic rose varieties, the company has long been associated with a romantic, antiquarian approach to roses that values history and character above novelty and spectacle.
Peter Beales the man was a significant figure in the world of rose cultivation and scholarship. His book Roses — first published in 1992 and subsequently revised and expanded — is one of the definitive reference works on the history and cultivation of roses, an encyclopaedic labour of love that documented thousands of varieties with photographs, histories, and cultivation notes. His nursery in Norfolk became both a commercial enterprise and a living museum, preserving varieties that might otherwise have been lost entirely as the nursery trade moved ever further in the direction of modern, heavily bred, disease-resistant varieties.
The company continues under his family's guidance, and has in recent years made a series of significant named rose launches at Chelsea that reflect both the legacy of the founder and a sophisticated understanding of the media value of celebrity association.
Kate Moss: Lemon-to-Cream and Beautifully Strange
At the 2026 Chelsea Flower Show — the most recent at the time of writing — Peter Beales Roses unveiled what became one of the most talked-about new variety launches in recent memory: a rose called Kate Moss.
The rose is a shrub variety producing lemon-to-cream blooms — a colour combination of unusual subtlety and refinement, moving from the yellow-green freshness of fresh lemon at the bud stage through to the soft, warm ivory of opened cream as the flowers mature. It was bred with a specific focus on reliable garden performance, repeat flowering through the season, and refined form, growing to around three feet in height and making it suitable for borders, containers, and smaller garden spaces. It was entered into the show's Plant of the Year competition, signalling the company's confidence in its horticultural merits.
Kate Moss, born 1974 in Croydon, South London, is one of the most famous models in the history of fashion — a woman whose career trajectory from the early 1990s to the present day has made her not merely a commercial success but a genuine cultural phenomenon. Discovered at the age of fourteen at Gatwick Airport, she rose to prominence in the early 1990s through a series of photographs for Calvin Klein jeans and became one of the defining faces of the "heroin chic" aesthetic that dominated fashion in that decade. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Moss did not fade with changing fashion trends: instead, she adapted, matured, and became a broader cultural presence — art gallery regular, fashion icon, mother, and eventually founder of her own modelling agency.
The choice of Kate Moss as the subject of a Peter Beales rose raises interesting questions about the relationship between celebrity and horticulture, between fashion and the garden. Fashion is, in a sense, the opposite of gardening: it celebrates the new, the transient, the seasonal, the ephemeral — the catwalk moment that is brilliant precisely because it will never come again. The garden, and the rose in particular, represents continuity, renewal, the recurrence of beauty through time. In naming a rose after Kate Moss, Peter Beales made an implicit argument: that beneath the transient glamour of the fashion world, Moss represents something enduring and refined enough to be worth commemorating in a living plant.
Moss herself seemed to understand this when she was photographed with the rose in her garden. Her remark — that having a flower named after her felt "beautifully strange," knowing she "could bloom quietly in someone's garden somewhere" — was precisely the right thing to say: funny, self-aware, touched by genuine feeling, and alert to the slight absurdity of the situation. It was a quote worthy of a true Chelsea flower show celebrity.
The lemon-to-cream colouring of the Kate Moss rose is worth dwelling on. In the language of roses, yellow and cream are colours associated with warmth, elegance, and a kind of considered restraint. They are not the fire-engine reds of passionate excess or the saccharine pinks of innocent romance; they are more complex, more grown-up, somehow more knowing. For a woman whose entire career has been built on a particular kind of cool, composed, unsentimental beauty, lemon-to-cream seems exactly right.
Part Five: Royal Blooms — Flowers Named for the British Monarchy
A Coronation and a Rose: The Queen Elizabeth Tradition
No institution has been more generously commemorated in flowers than the British royal family. The tradition extends back centuries and has, if anything, intensified in the modern era as rose breeders have recognised both the genuine affection the public feels for the monarchy and the commercial value of royal associations.
The most famous royal rose in history is probably the Queen Elizabeth grandiflora, bred by the American horticulturist Walter Lammerts and introduced in 1953 to coincide with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. A vigorous, upright plant with large, candy-pink blooms and a strong constitution, it became one of the most widely planted roses in the world — an extraordinary commercial success story that demonstrated, definitively, the commercial power of a royal name.
The Queen Elizabeth rose is in many ways the model for all subsequent celebrity and royal rose namings: a high-quality variety chosen carefully enough to carry the weight of a famous name without embarrassment, introduced at a moment of maximum public interest (a coronation, a jubilee, a royal wedding), and possessed of the kind of vigorous, adaptable health that would make it genuinely useful to ordinary gardeners rather than merely a commemorative curiosity.
Silver, Golden, and Platinum: Jubilee Roses
Each of Queen Elizabeth II's major jubilees was marked by new rose introductions. The Silver Jubilee in 1977 was commemorated by a bush rose in a deep coral tone, bred to vigorous health and generous flowering. The Golden Jubilee in 2002 was marked by a yellow-hued variety. The Diamond Jubilee in 2012 saw David Austin introduce the Royal Jubilee rose (Auspaddle), with chalice-shaped blooms in deep pink and paler undersides, carrying a rich, fruity fragrance.
For the Platinum Jubilee in 2022, both David Austin and Harkness produced commemorative roses. Harkness created the official Platinum Jubilee Rose, while David Austin released Elizabeth (Ausmajesty) — large blush-pink rosettes with a sweet, refined scent. The two companies' different approaches to commemorating the same event was instructive: Harkness went for the bold, formal tribute of an officially sanctioned commemorative variety, while Austin created something more quietly personal — a rose that felt like a meditation on the Queen's particular character rather than a public proclamation of her status.
William and Catherine: A Wedding in Bloom
When Prince William married Catherine Middleton in April 2011, David Austin created a rose specifically for the occasion: William and Catherine (Ausvolume), a delightful English shrub rose with white, shallowly cupped blooms and a fragrance of myrrh. The choice of white for the wedding rose was inevitable, but the myrrh fragrance — unusual, complex, slightly resinous — gave it a character that set it apart from any number of more predictably romantic rose varieties. The rose bloomed consistently throughout the summer, creating a charming display that many gardeners planted that year as a permanent memorial to the occasion.
The William and Catherine rose has particular historical interest in light of the Catherine's Rose launched by Harkness fourteen years later in 2025. The two roses — one celebrating a joyful royal beginning, the other implicitly supporting a royal recovery from illness — together trace an arc of public affection that says something profound about the relationship between the royal family and the British horticultural world.
Princess Diana: The People's Princess in Perpetual Bloom
No member of the royal family has been commemorated in flowers more extensively or more internationally than Diana, Princess of Wales. In the years following her death in August 1997, breeders around the world rushed to create varieties that would carry her name — or at least invoke her memory — and the result was a proliferation of Diana-associated blooms in virtually every class of cultivated flower.
In Britain, the most notable is the cluster-flowering white floribunda bred by Harkness and named the Princess of Wales. Diana's association with white flowers was well established: her famous bridal bouquet had included white gardenias, lily of the valley, white freesias, and white Odette orchids, chosen to reflect her purity and simplicity. A white rose named for her therefore carried obvious symbolic force.
Elsewhere in the plant world, Diana's name was attached to a dahlia — a gorgeous coral pink, yellow, and lavender variety launched in 2000 but chosen by Diana herself before her death in 1997, during breeders' trials by Robin Marks. The fact that Diana had personally selected this dahlia adds a particular poignancy: it is one of the very few named varieties where the person honoured had a direct role in choosing the specific plant that would carry their name.
A clematis, an alstroemeria, and a hydrangea have also been named after Diana. Together, these varied tributes suggest both the breadth of affection for her memory and the way in which different plant families carry different emotional associations. The rose says romance, tradition, and English beauty; the dahlia says exuberance and colour; the clematis says generosity and vigour; the hydrangea says resilience and endurance.
The Duke of Edinburgh: Service in Petals
The Duke of Edinburgh Rose, bred by Harkness after Prince Philip's death in April 2021, is a deep pink variety delicately rippled with white lines, possessing a soft and refined fragrance. It was presented to Queen Elizabeth II by the RHS president Keith Weed as a "commemorative rose for all the marvellous things that he did over his lifetime." The Queen herself described it as "lovely" — one of those single-word royal endorsements that carries enormous weight precisely because of its restraint.
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921-2021), served as royal consort for over seventy years — the longest-serving consort in British history. His public persona was famously complicated: known simultaneously for his genuine dedication to public service, his establishment of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme that has benefited millions of young people, his passionate commitment to conservation and environmental causes, and his sometimes mordantly candid sense of humour. A deep pink rose delicately marked with white seems, on reflection, an appropriate tribute to a man of strong colour and character, but one in whom careful observation revealed unexpected refinements.
Part Six: Flowers Named After the Arts World
Ingrid Bergman: Swedish Elegance in Deep Red
Among the named roses in the Harkness portfolio, the Ingrid Bergman stands out for both its quality and its longevity. A deeply coloured red double rose with impressive disease resistance — it holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit, one of the most respected endorsements in British horticulture — it was named after the Swedish actress whose film career remains one of the most celebrated in cinematic history.
Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) appeared in a catalogue of films that includes some of the most beloved movies ever made: Casablanca (1942), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Gaslight (1944), Notorious (1946), Stromboli (1950), Anastasia (1956), Autumn Sonata (1978), and A Woman Called Golda (1982). She won three Academy Awards for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress over a career that spanned four decades and three continents.
The naming of this particularly excellent rose after Bergman fits the tradition perfectly: the plant is as distinguished in its field as its namesake was in hers. The deep red colour — rich, intense, slightly darkening towards the edge — suggests something of the emotional depth and seriousness that characterised Bergman's finest performances, while the remarkable health and disease resistance of the variety speaks to a kind of fundamental robustness that survives changing fashions and difficult conditions.
Natasha Richardson: Pink Beauty in Memory
The Natasha Richardson rose, bred by Harkness, is a floribunda variety with clusters of gorgeous baby-pink double flowers and a strong fragrance. It is named after the British actress Natasha Richardson (1963-2009), who died tragically young following a skiing accident, and who was one of the most admired stage and screen actresses of her generation. Richardson was the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson, making her one of the most distinguished members of perhaps the most celebrated acting dynasty in British theatrical history. Her own performances — in The Parent Trap (1998), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), and many celebrated stage productions — established her as a figure of remarkable intelligence and sensitivity.
The delicacy of the baby-pink blooms and the strength of their fragrance suggest the Harkness breeders were thinking about something soft but persistent — beauty that is both vulnerable and enduring. The rose has become a small, fragrant memorial to a woman who died before her time, a reminder that flowers have always served this commemorative function: to transform grief into something that grows.
Alfie Boe: Yellow Blooms and Musical Theatre
The Alfie Boe rose, created by Harkness, produces buttery yellow blooms with an excellent fragrance, repeat-flowering throughout the summer. Alfie Boe, born in 1973 in Fleetwood, Lancashire, is one of the most celebrated tenors in British musical theatre, best known for his portrayal of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables at London's Queen's Theatre and for his popular stage and screen performances alongside Michael Ball. He has become one of the most beloved figures in the British musical mainstream — someone whose warmth, vocal generosity, and lack of pretension have made him accessible to audiences far beyond the traditional opera world.
The yellow of the Alfie Boe rose seems perfectly pitched: warm, generous, sunny, slightly show-stopping but fundamentally good-humoured. It is the kind of colour that makes you feel better about the world — which is, in essence, what Alfie Boe's performances do.
Part Seven: Flowers Named After Horticulturists and Scientists
Constance Spry: The Woman Who Reinvented Flower Arranging
David Austin's first rose, Constance Spry (Ausfirst), introduced in 1961, was named after one of the most significant figures in British floral art. Constance Spry (1886-1960) was a British florist, author, and educator who is credited with revolutionising flower arranging in the mid-twentieth century. She moved away from the rigid, formal arrangements that had dominated the Victorian and Edwardian eras — symmetrical structures of carefully graded flowers in predictable colour combinations — and introduced a looser, more painterly approach that drew on the natural abundance of the English garden and the visual lessons of Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings.
Spry was also a passionate grower and advocate of antique and old garden roses at a time when they had been largely supplanted by modern hybrid teas. She wrote extensively about roses, grew them prolifically, and was instrumental in maintaining awareness of varieties that might otherwise have been lost entirely. When she was commissioned to arrange the flowers for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 — the most watched floral display in British history — she chose, characteristically, a combination of traditional English garden flowers rather than formal hot-house exotica.
Austin's decision to name his first rose after Constance Spry was therefore a deliberate statement of intent: this new rose would align itself with the traditions she had championed, would recall the form and fragrance of the old roses she had loved, and would attempt to bring them forward into a new era. The Constance Spry rose itself — a large, cupped climber with enormous pink blooms and a powerful myrrh fragrance, flowering once in early summer in an extravagant burst — remains one of the most romantic and spectacular of all climbing roses, a plant that feels genuinely historical even as it blooms in twenty-first-century gardens.
Graham Thomas: The Plantsman's Plantsman
We have already discussed the Graham Thomas rose at length, but the man himself deserves closer examination. Graham Stuart Thomas (1909-2003) was a figure of unique importance in twentieth-century British horticulture. As Gardens Adviser to the National Trust from 1955 to 1974, he oversaw the planting and maintenance of scores of great historic gardens, and his influence on British taste in garden design — his preference for flowing, naturalistic planting, his love of species plants and botanical curiosity, his belief that a great garden should change and develop through the seasons — was immense and lasting.
But his contribution to rose culture was perhaps even more significant. At a time when old garden roses — Gallicas, Damasks, Albas, Centifolias, Mosses, and the repeat-flowering Bourbons, Portlands, and Hybrid Perpetuals that had been bred in the nineteenth century — were largely dismissed as old-fashioned and impractical by the commercial nursery trade, Thomas was their most passionate and knowledgeable advocate. His books Shrub Roses of Today (1962), Climbing Roses Old and New (1965), and The Old Shrub Roses (1955) effectively created the modern cult of the old rose, inspiring a generation of gardeners — David Austin most prominently among them — to seek out and celebrate varieties that the rest of the industry was abandoning.
The Graham Thomas rose, with its extraordinary deep butter-yellow colour and strong tea fragrance, was immediately recognised as a masterpiece when it was unveiled at Chelsea in 1983. Its induction into the World Federation of Rose Societies Hall of Fame in 2009, the year before the man himself would have turned one hundred, was entirely appropriate recognition for a variety that had done as much as its namesake to change the way the English-speaking world thinks about roses.
Part Eight: The Science and Art of Breeding Named Varieties
Seven to Ten Years in the Making
The development of a new rose variety suitable for naming after a celebrity or notable person is a process of extraordinary patience and rigour. It begins with the selection of two parent plants, chosen for the specific qualities — colour, fragrance, disease resistance, flower form, growth habit — that the breeder hopes to combine and improve. The pollen from one parent is carefully transferred to the stigma of the other, and the resulting rose hips are harvested and the seeds extracted.
These seeds are then germinated and grown on as seedlings. From an initial cross, a breeder might produce hundreds or even thousands of seedlings, each one genetically unique. In the first year, the seedlings are evaluated simply for vigour and basic flower quality. Those that show promise are grown on; the rest are discarded. Over the following years, the selected seedlings are evaluated in detail: for the size, form, colour, and scent of their flowers; for their disease resistance under varying weather conditions; for their repeat-flowering habit; for the quality of their foliage; for their behaviour in different soil types and climatic conditions. At each stage, further culling takes place.
Philip Harkness has described the scale of this process: for every new rose the company brings to market, they grow twelve to fifteen thousand plants for research purposes. An enormous proportion of these are not good enough to be introduced and are never given names; they are simply stepping stones on the road to the goal. The financial investment is substantial, and the seven-to-eight-year development cycle means that decisions made at the beginning of the process are reflecting market and cultural conditions that may have significantly changed by the time the variety is ready for launch.
The decision to attach a famous name to a variety adds a further layer of complexity. The celebrity or their representatives must be approached and the association proposed. They must be shown the variety and convinced that it is of sufficient quality and character to represent them well. Some individuals have been famously exacting in their requirements: Barbra Streisand, when approached by American rose breeders about naming a variety after her, specified that the rose must have exceptional fragrance and extraordinary disease resistance — she wanted nothing mediocre bearing her name. The Barbra Streisand Rose, a hybrid tea with large lavender flowers, deep magenta petal edges, and a rich citrusy rose scent, was the result: a variety that fully justified her confidence.
What Makes a Name Worth Having?
Not every celebrity rose is a horticultural masterpiece. The tradition of naming roses after famous people has occasionally been criticised for prioritising the commercial benefits of a famous name over purely botanical quality — for creating varieties that are memorable for their names rather than their flowers. This is a fair criticism, and it is a tension that the best breeders are acutely aware of.
The gold standard, as exemplified by Graham Thomas or Gertrude Jekyll, is a variety whose name and horticultural qualities are so perfectly matched that each reinforces the other — where the rose not only honours the person but illuminates something true about them, and where the person's association enhances the rose's meaning and cultural resonance. When this works, it produces something with a cumulative power that neither the name nor the flower could achieve alone.
The Chelsea Flower Show, with its unique combination of horticultural expertise and celebrity glamour, its tradition of royal visits and media attention, its hundreds of passionate expert gardeners and its millions of television viewers, is the ideal environment for these combinations to be tested. A variety launched at Chelsea receives a degree of scrutiny — from professional horticulturists, from knowledgeable amateur gardeners, from the RHS judges, from the wider press — that no other venue in the world could provide. The show acts as both a launch platform and a quality filter: a rose that impresses at Chelsea, that wins medals, that is chosen for the Plant of the Year competition, has passed a test that carries genuine weight.
Part Nine: Beyond Roses — Other Flowers Named After Notable People at Chelsea
The Dahlia and Diana
While the rose is the dominant medium for celebrity flower naming at Chelsea, it is far from the only one. The dahlia, in particular, has a long tradition of named varieties — and the Diana, Princess of Wales dahlia launched in 2000 (but chosen by Diana herself before her death) is one of the most emotionally significant.
Dahlias are in many ways the ideal commemoration flower for people of exuberant, vivid personality: their enormous, brightly coloured blooms, their unapologetic abundance, and their late-summer glory make them the opposite of the English rose's romantic refinement. The Diana dahlia — coral pink, yellow, and lavender in its petals — was a fitting tribute to a woman who brought colour and warmth into spaces that could easily have remained formal and austere.
The Clematis and Meghan Markle
Following Prince Harry's wedding to Meghan Markle in May 2018, New Leaf Plants created a clematis named after the new Duchess of Sussex. It was launched at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2019 by Thorncroft Clematis. The choice of a clematis — a plant known for its vigorous climbing growth, its ability to thrive in varied conditions, and its extraordinary diversity of flower form — as the medium for commemorating a newcomer to the royal family was interesting. Clematis are not roses: they don't carry the weight of centuries of romantic and commemorative tradition. But they have their own kind of beauty and vitality, and for someone who had come from outside the established order to claim a place in one of the world's most formal institutions, a vigorously climbing plant seemed not inappropriate.
The Agapanthus and Queen Mother
A white and blueish-purple African lily (agapanthus) was named after the Queen Mother — Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who lived from 1900 to 2002 and remained one of the most beloved figures in British public life throughout her extraordinary century-long span. The Queen Mother's agapanthus loves the sun and flowers all summer long — a plant of warmth, generosity, and solar pleasure that captures something of the public image of a woman whose apparently effortless grace and seemingly inexhaustible cheerfulness made her, for many Britons, the human embodiment of an uncomplicated ideal.
Part Ten: The 2026 Show and the Ongoing Tradition
David Beckham: The King's Foundation Rose
At the 2026 Chelsea Flower Show, David Austin Roses was expected to unveil a new English shrub rose named after David Beckham — a scented white variety, described as ten years in the making, commissioned by the footballer's daughter Harper to mark his fiftieth birthday. The rose was developed in support of The King's Foundation, for which Beckham serves as an ambassador.
David Beckham's choice as the subject of a David Austin rose represents a significant expansion of the named variety tradition: Beckham is primarily associated with football and fashion, two worlds not typically associated with English shrub roses. Yet his involvement with The King's Foundation — an organisation whose values around sustainability, traditional craftsmanship, and gardening align closely with David Austin's own commitments — made the association more natural than it might initially appear. The white rose, with its associations of purity, simplicity, and grace, also connects to something in Beckham's public persona that goes beyond mere celebrity: a quality of considered elegance that has made him one of the most enduring figures in British popular culture.
Kate Moss and the Fashion-Garden Connection
The Kate Moss rose from Peter Beales is not the first time the fashion world has intersected with the Chelsea Flower Show's named variety tradition, but it may be the most glamorous expression of it. Fashion and floristry have always had deep connections — from Constance Spry's ground-breaking work at Colefax and Fowler to the flower-strewn couture creations of Alexander McQueen — but the naming of a permanent rose variety after a fashion icon suggests a different kind of relationship: one in which the ephemeral world of fashion aspires to the permanence and recurring beauty of the garden.
The lemon-to-cream blooms of the Kate Moss rose, with their subtle evolution from yellow to ivory as the flowers open and mature, carry their own kind of fashion statement: restrained, refined, never obvious, but unmistakably beautiful. Peter Beales' choice to enter the variety in the Plant of the Year competition signalled their confidence that this was not merely a celebrity naming exercise but a genuine horticultural achievement.
The Saga Rose and Sir David Beckham at 2026
Also launched at the 2026 show was The Saga Rose from Harkness — a repeat-flowering floribunda bush rose celebrating seventy-five years of the Saga brand, blending a sweet scent with notes of light spice. And in the broader context of the show, the tradition of named rose launches continued to demonstrate its vitality: five major Harkness rose launches in 2026 included Resilience, a wildlife-friendly Persian rose raising money for Parkinson's UK.
The philanthropic dimension of many recent named rose launches is worth noting. Both the Elton John AIDS Foundation Rose (Harkness, 2025) and the Resilience rose (Harkness, 2026) were explicitly associated with charitable fundraising, donating a proportion of sales proceeds to named causes. This development represents a maturation of the named variety tradition: from pure commemoration, through celebrity marketing, to a model in which the commercial success of a beautiful named rose becomes directly linked to causes its bearer cares about.
Part Eleven: International Named Varieties and the Chelsea Context
Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn: Hollywood in the Garden
While the Chelsea Flower Show focuses primarily on British and European floriculture, the tradition of naming roses after famous people is international, and some of the most celebrated named varieties in the world carry American or international celebrity names. The Marilyn Monroe rose — bred in the United States and featured in rose gardens internationally — is a hybrid tea of warm coral to creamy peach, its warm tones suggesting the luminous, glamorous quality of its namesake's screen presence. The Audrey Hepburn rose, similarly, is a blush pink variety of unusual refinement — elegant rather than showy, suggesting the particular kind of restrained, patrician beauty that Hepburn represented.
Both Monroe and Hepburn have been honoured in the rose gardens of Geneva's famous Parc de la Grange, which maintains one of the world's great collections of named rose varieties associated with cultural figures. The international reach of the named variety tradition — the fact that a single name can generate commercial sales and sentimental attachment in dozens of countries simultaneously — has made celebrity roses an increasingly significant part of the global rose market.
The Princess Diana Legacy Abroad
The international dimension of Diana's floral legacy is particularly striking. The rose named for her, the dahlia she selected herself, the agapanthus varieties bearing her memory, and the dozens of other flowers named in her honour around the world collectively represent something unprecedented in the history of flower naming: a global commemorative project in which the entire horticultural world, from California to Japan, from Australia to Scandinavia, participated in expressing grief for a single individual.
This scale of floral commemoration was made possible by Diana's unique position in late-twentieth-century celebrity culture: she was simultaneously the most photographed woman in the world and the most personally loved, a combination that translated naturally into the language of flowers. The rose, in particular, with its ancient associations with love and beauty, was the obvious vehicle for the expression of feelings that many people found difficult to put into words.
Part Twelve: The Future of Named Varieties
Growing Fields, Growing Names
The tradition of naming flowers after notable people shows no signs of diminishing at the Chelsea Flower Show. If anything, it is growing in both scale and sophistication. The increasing sophistication of celebrity brand management, the growth of social media (which allows a celebrity rose launch to generate immediate global coverage), and the increasingly complex relationship between celebrity, charity, and commercial brand all create new opportunities and incentives for named variety launches.
At the same time, the standards being set by the leading breeders continue to rise. The seven-to-ten-year development cycles, the rigorous health and performance criteria, the careful matching of plant character to human personality — all of these ensure that the best named varieties are genuinely outstanding horticultural achievements rather than mere marketing exercises. When a rose wins the Plant of the Year award at Chelsea, or when it is inducted into the World Federation of Rose Societies Hall of Fame, the name it carries achieves a permanence that transcends any individual moment of celebrity.
The Digital Age and the Named Rose
One development that has transformed the named variety landscape in recent years is the role of digital media in amplifying launches. When the Kate Moss rose was unveiled at the 2026 Chelsea Flower Show, the image of the model in her garden holding the lemon-cream blooms circulated almost instantaneously across every major social media platform, generating coverage that would have required months of traditional advertising to achieve. The same was true of the Elton John AIDS Foundation Rose in 2025, which generated media coverage extending far beyond the horticultural press into music, entertainment, and news media worldwide.
This digital amplification has made the Chelsea named variety launch even more commercially significant than it already was. A single viral moment — a celebrity photograph, a memorable quote, a beautifully composed image of a new rose — can drive awareness and sales to a degree that the nurseries of the early twentieth century could not have imagined. It has also, perhaps inevitably, raised the stakes: the pressure on breeders and their celebrity partners to produce varieties of genuine quality and originality has never been greater.
Beyond Britain: New Names, New Voices
The John Ystumllyn Rose from Harkness represents one important direction for the named variety tradition: towards the recovery of forgotten or marginalised figures from history, rather than the celebration of the already celebrated. As gardening culture increasingly grapples with questions of inclusion, diversity, and the representation of the full range of human experience, the named rose offers an unexpected tool: a way of restoring names to prominence, of creating living memorials to figures who have been overlooked.
This direction is also visible in the growing number of named varieties commemorating figures from fields other than entertainment and royalty: scientists, environmental activists, medical researchers, teachers, community heroes. The Captain Tom Rose was, in a sense, a harbinger of this trend: not a traditional celebrity, but a private individual who had become a public figure through a single extraordinary act of determined generosity. Captain Tom's rose is, in its way, a democratic monument — a tribute to the power of ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
Part Thirteen: What Named Flowers Tell Us About Ourselves
The Mirror of Commemorative Horticulture
The history of flowers named after notable people at the Chelsea Flower Show is, in a profound sense, a mirror held up to British culture and values over the course of more than a century. The progression from Victorian reverence for royalty and the aristocracy, through the twentieth-century embrace of entertainers and sports figures, to the twenty-first-century inclusion of activists, diversity champions, and fashion icons — all of this reflects the changing shape of public life, the shifting definitions of who deserves to be celebrated, and the evolving understanding of what a worthy life looks like.
The rose is the dominant medium for these commemorations, and the rose's cultural associations — love, beauty, romance, England, fragility, resilience, the cycle of seasons — give every named variety an emotional charge that goes beyond its horticultural qualities. To plant a named rose in a garden is to participate in an act of remembrance that connects the private space of the garden to the public world of history and culture. The Kate Moss rose blooming in a Norfolk garden carries with it the whole weight of late twentieth-century fashion culture. The Graham Thomas rose in a Shropshire border carries the legacy of one of the greatest plantsmen of the twentieth century. The Elizabeth rose, in whatever garden it flowers, carries the memory of the longest-reigning monarch in British history.
This is why the tradition endures: not because it generates commercial sales (though it does), not because celebrities enjoy the prestige of having their names in catalogues (though they do), but because there is something deeply human about the desire to attach names to beauty, to make the ephemeral permanent through the patient work of breeding and growing, and to find in the recurring bloom of a rose some small consolation for the inevitable passage of time.
The Language of Flowers, Updated
The Victorian language of flowers — that elaborate code in which different blooms carried different meanings and could be combined into wordless messages of love, condolence, congratulation, or rebuke — is mostly forgotten now, though florists still occasionally invoke it. But the tradition of named flowers at Chelsea suggests that something of that symbolic impulse survives in a different form.
When Harkness names a rose after Captain Tom Moore and donates proceeds to NHS charities, they are participating in a language of flowers: the language of gratitude, of public acknowledgement, of communal grief and communal hope. When Peter Beales names a rose after Kate Moss and she says she could "bloom quietly in someone's garden," they are speaking in a language of flowers: the language of beauty, of modest endurance, of the quiet persistence of something lovely through changing seasons. When David Austin named his first rose after Constance Spry, he was speaking in a language of flowers: the language of influence, of inspiration, of the debt one generation owes to the next.
This is the deepest meaning of the Chelsea named variety tradition: it is a form of speech, a way of saying things that cannot easily be said in words, about what we value, who we love, what we fear to lose, and what we hope to preserve.
Conclusion: Kate Moss and the Quiet Permanence of Bloom
At the 2026 Chelsea Flower Show, among the spectacular show gardens and the extraordinary Great Pavilion displays, a modest shrub rose called Kate Moss made its public debut. Lemon-to-cream in colour, bred for reliable performance and refined form, entered for the Plant of the Year award, it joined a tradition that stretches back through time to the very foundations of the show itself: the tradition of naming flowers after people worth remembering.
Kate Moss, photographed holding the rose in her garden, said it felt "beautifully strange." It is the right phrase for the experience — the strangeness of finding your name attached to a living thing, to something that will grow and bloom and be tended by strangers in gardens you will never visit, for years and decades to come. There is humility in it, but also a kind of immortality. The flower does not need you. It will bloom whether you are famous or forgotten, whether the world remembers your name or not. But as long as it blooms with your name, something of you persists — quietly, seasonally, beautifully — in the world.
That is what Graham Thomas understood when he grew his old roses. That is what Gertrude Jekyll understood when she planted her borders at Munstead Wood. That is what David Austin understood when he named his first rose after a woman who had changed how the English thought about flowers. That is what the breeders at Harkness understood when they created a rose for Captain Tom, for Queen Elizabeth, for Elton John, for Natasha Richardson, for Lynda Bellingham, for all the others. And that is what Peter Beales understood when they spent several years creating a lemon-to-cream shrub rose and gave it the name of a girl from Croydon who became one of the most photographed women in the world.
The Chelsea Flower Show will continue to be the stage on which these namings happen, where breeders and celebrities and members of the public come together for a week in May to celebrate the extraordinary range and beauty of the flowering world. And each year, among the gold medals and the People's Choice awards and the spectacular show gardens, a few new flowers will carry new names — names of the admired and the beloved, the famous and the forgotten, the living and the dead — out into the world's gardens, there to bloom and bloom again, season after season, in the quiet, persistent way that flowers do.
Appendix: Selected Named Varieties Associated with the Chelsea Flower Show
Graham Thomas (Ausmas) — David Austin Roses, 1983. Deep butter-yellow English Rose with strong tea fragrance. Named for the horticulturist and old rose champion Graham Stuart Thomas. World Federation of Rose Societies Hall of Fame 2009.
Gertrude Jekyll (Ausbord) — David Austin Roses, 1986. Deep pink, strongly fragrant English Rose. Named for the celebrated garden designer. World's Favourite Rose, World Federation of Rose Societies, 2025.
Constance Spry (Ausfirst) — David Austin Roses, 1961. Large-flowered climbing rose with myrrh fragrance. Named for the florist and floral educator commissioned to arrange flowers for the 1953 coronation.
Darcey Bussell (Ausdecorum) — David Austin Roses, 2006. Compact English shrub rose with deep crimson-pink blooms. Named for the ballerina Dame Darcey Bussell.
Dame Judi Dench (Ausquaker) — David Austin Roses, 2017. Pastel orange rosette blooms with tea fragrance. Named for the actress Dame Judi Dench and launched at Chelsea Flower Show 2017.
Elizabeth (Ausmajesty) — David Austin Roses, 2022. Blush-pink rosette blooms with Old Rose and lemon sherbet fragrance. Memorial rose for Queen Elizabeth II.
The King's Rose — David Austin Roses, 2025. Deep, fragrant variety developed in support of The King's Foundation.
Princess of Wales — Harkness Roses. Cluster-flowering white floribunda. Named for Diana, Princess of Wales.
Catherine's Rose — Harkness Roses, 2025. Floribunda, mid-to-dark rose pink with mango fragrance. Named for Catherine, Princess of Wales.
The Elton John AIDS Foundation Rose — Harkness Roses, 2025. Hybrid tea, pearly pink to cherry blossom, melon fragrance. Charitable association with the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
Queen Elizabeth II Rose — Harkness Roses, 2022. Hybrid tea, soft pink, light amber and cream. Official Platinum Jubilee commemorative rose, personally selected by Queen Elizabeth II.
The Duke of Edinburgh Rose — Harkness Roses, 2021. Deep pink with delicate white lines. Memorial tribute presented to Queen Elizabeth II by the RHS.
Dame Deborah James Rose — Harkness Roses, 2022. Named for the cancer campaigner and journalist who raised over forty-seven million pounds for cancer research.
The Captain Tom Rose — Harkness Roses. Named for Captain Sir Tom Moore, who raised over thirty-two million pounds for NHS charities by walking one hundred laps of his garden during lockdown.
John Ystumllyn Rose — Harkness Roses, 2021. Yellow blooms, dark glossy foliage. Named for the eighteenth-century Welsh-African gardener whose story was recovered by historians.
Lynda Bellingham — Harkness Roses. Light pink to amber orange, many-petalled. Named for the television actress and presenter.
Natasha Richardson (Harpacket) — Harkness Roses, 2011. Floribunda, pink with strong citrus fragrance. Named for the actress.
Ingrid Bergman — Harkness Roses. Deep red, strongly fragrant, RHS Award of Garden Merit. Named for the Swedish actress.
Alfie Boe — Harkness Roses. Buttery yellow with excellent fragrance. Named for the musical theatre tenor.
Lady Carnarvon — Harkness Roses. Floribunda, pink-blushed white. Named for the Countess of Carnarvon of Highclere Castle.
Kate Moss — Peter Beales Roses, 2026. Shrub rose, lemon-to-cream blooms, repeat flowering, approximately three feet high. Named for the model Kate Moss. Entered for Chelsea Plant of the Year 2026.
Sir David Beckham Rose — David Austin Roses, 2026. Scented white English shrub rose, ten years in development. Named for the footballer David Beckham, commissioned by his daughter Harper for his fiftieth birthday. Charitable association with The King's Foundation.
William and Catherine (Ausvolume) — David Austin Roses, 2011. White English shrub rose with myrrh fragrance. Created to celebrate the royal wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.
Royal Jubilee (Auspaddle) — David Austin Roses, 2012. Deep pink chalice-shaped blooms with fruity fragrance. Named for Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.
Diana, Princess of Wales Dahlia — Bred by Robin Marks, introduced 2000. Coral pink, yellow and lavender petals. Chosen by Diana herself before her death in 1997.
Meghan Markle Clematis — Thorncroft Clematis for New Leaf Plants, 2019. Launched at Chelsea Flower Show 2019. Named for the Duchess of Sussex following her royal wedding.
