This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit gardenbasics.substack.com 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: ========== 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 an
