Is this rose colour changing because I've been a numpty ?

[FigmentOfYourImagination]

I have a white rose (Rosa Winchester Cathedral) planted between 2 bright pink roses Rosa Gertrude Jekyll). The 2 have only been planted together for 2 summers (this will be their 3rd).

The first summer the blooms on the white rose were pure white, however last summer they were appearing with raspberry ripple type stripes not quite as bold as these but not a million miles off either.

Are the bees cross pollinating the roses and so I'm ending up with an unintentional hybrid ?

will watch this with interest as it is not something i have thought about before but would presume it could be entirely possible.

No, if the bees are cross-pollinating them, it would be plants grown from the resulting seeds that might be a different colour (think of it like in a mixed marriage - it's the children who turn out to be a mixture of the parents colours).

But I don't know why your rose has changed colour...

Ah, thanks AMIS.

some plants change colour depending on what sort of soil is put on?

I know NOTHING about gardening, just a thought!!

Could it be a sucker, Winchester Cathedral's 'parent' is a pink Mary Rose (if I remember correctly )???

I wonder if it could be a virus thing - like you see withe stripey tulips?

would go with rollmops suggestion. some roses of one colour are grafted onto a parent plant of another colour - so if you get a sucker growing from the parent plant - you will get a different colour rose. Some rose bushes only a short life span (of the colour that you want before the parent takes over).

Thank you rollmops and madrose

We need a [gardening oracle] emoticon

I found the following on the David Austin Roses page - so in this case my interpretation would be that Mary Rose is the parent, and that in this context "parent" is the previous generation rather than the rootstock the Winchester Cathedral Rose has been grafted onto. To a large degree, though, that's semantics - if you don't like the pink additions you need to prune out the stem below the reversion.

Q: I have a Winchester Cathedral rose and some of the petals have turned pink. Have I discovered a new sport?

A: Sadly not. Winchester Cathedral and Redouté are both sports of Mary Rose and occasionally either of these roses can revert to their originals. The reversion can be anything from a fully pink bloom to the merest fleck on a petal and can be most attractive. If you'd like to keep the plant to one colour, simply prune the stem back to below the point that the sport originates from.

Tangle that is very useful. Thank you