Hybrid Musk Roses
This is a small group, but it includes some of the very best of all garden roses. Hybrid Musks make excellent shrubs with a wonderful show in midsummer, and many of them also flower well a second time. The flowers are produced in large, loose bunches or sprays and are small or medium-sized, usually white, cream, pink, or buff, mostly with excellent scent.

Hybrid Musks have always been associated with the Rev. Joseph Pemberton of Havering-atte-Bower in Essex. He and his sister Florence were successful exhibitors of the large-flowered roses that were in fashion in the late 19th century, such as Hybrid Perpetuals, and he was one of the early members of the National Rose Society of Great Britain. Though taught to bud roses by his father at the age of 12, it was only in around 1913, when he was over 60 and had retired, that he began to breed his own roses at their family home. Pemberton aimed to produce tough garden roses such as he remembered as a child, not the large exhibition types then claiming the attention of professional breeders. By crossing ‘Trier’, raised in 1904, with various Hybrid Teas, Pemberton produced a new race, eventually called the Hybrid Musks.

‘Trier’ is a large shrub, very well scented, and repeats through the season, characteristics found in most of Pemberton’s roses. Its uncertain parentage contains elements of R. multiflora, which has given its extra hardiness to the Hybrid Musks, and of Noisettes. After Pemberton’s death in 1926, his sister and his gardener J.A. Bentall introduced more of his roses and Bentall later raised and introduced his own Hybrid Musks.

Wilhelm Kordes in Germany introduced some excellent roses of similar appearance; ‘Fritz Nobis’ has lovely pale pink, nearly double flowers, but in summer only. ‘Lavender Lassie’ is a pale lavender with good repeat-flowering. ‘Wilhelm’ is also a good repeat-flowerer in a cheerful red, and had the advantage of being tetraploid and therefore fertile with contemporary Hybrid Teas and Floribundas.

Recently other breeders, and particularly Louis Lens in Belgium, have used dwarf R. multiflora, and produced roses many of which have the habit of short-growing, repeat-flowering ramblers, closer to Pemberton’s ‘Ballerina’. Lens used other roses such as R. helenae crossed with Hybrid Teas to produce climbers with improved flowers; the Lens roses have a somewhat different character and are grouped separately here.


Hybrid Musks need little pruning, apart from thinning the older wood to make room for the new. Less pruning gives earlier flowers in smaller heads; hard pruning gives later flowers in large heads and is used if the plants are to be moved, or are weak or newly planted. Most Hybrid Musks are hardy to -20°F (-29°C), Zone 5.