Little Rose in a Downtown Cemetery

Last summer, while I was spending a summer afternoon lunching and cemetery exploring with my friend Sharon, I found a small rose that I had never noticed.  I took a couple of lousy photos of it with my old iPhone 4, to remind myself to come back another day to look at it more closely, and we moved on.

A few days later, I returned with my pruners and other supplies ... to tidy up the bush and snip a few small cuttings.  One of the cuttings rooted, and the resulting plant now lives in the rose garden in our front yard.

Which rose is this?  My own plant is still too small and immature to make an accurate assessment, so I made a visit to the cemetery plant last week to see what I could figure it out.  

I was thrilled to see that the plant was much larger and healthier than when I first saw it in 2015 ... about four feet high and three feet wide, in contrast to last summer's just-over-one-foot-high size.

I think I figured out its identity.  I believe that it may be 'Clotilde Soupert'.

Bush is thick, with rounded, disease-resistant foliage.  It has very few thorns.  Flowers open pink with a darker pink center, and quickly fade almost to white.  Spent flowers turn brown and hang on the plant for a long time.  All of this definitely suggests 'Clotilde Soupert' or another rose like her.  

Do you rose people agree?

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When I opened Blogger to write this post, I noticed that it is post #1200.  Dang!  Hard to wrap my head around the fact that I have had 1200 separate things to say here since November 2008.