True Bloom® True Passion™ Hybrid Tea Shrub Rose

The red on True Passion is about as vivid as a rose gets. Orange-red and fully saturated, it reads from across a yard and holds that intensity through summer heat instead of fading. True Bloom® True Passion™ hybrid tea shrub rose (Rosa 'LIM10') carries double flowers with 25 to 30 petals and a peppery scent, growing 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide in full sun, hardy to 10 below zero. Resistance to disease, heat, and drought is extreme even by the standards of this line. It won Biltmore in 2016 and the A.R.T.S. award in 2018, and it is one of the two roses the Hybrid Tea Shrub class was created for. True Bloom roses come from Ping Lim, the breeder behind the Easy Elegance line, who set out to cross hybrid tea roses with disease-resistant shrubs and get hybrid tea flowers on a plant that survives without a spray program. Two of them, True Passion and True Inspiration, were distinct enough that the program created a class for them: Hybrid Tea Shrub. They are grown on their own roots rather than grafted, so a plant killed back in a hard winter regrows as itself rather than reverting to rootstock, and there are no suckers from below a graft union. Most are hardy to 10 below zero, and high petal counts are the signature of the line. The upright narrow habit, taller than wide, suits a tight bed or a spot between a walk and a wall.