Different Types of Roses
Whether you're planting a rose bed or picking a bouquet, it helps to know the three types most gardeners actually encounter.
Hybrid Tea
The hybrid tea is the rose most people picture by default — a single large bloom at the end of a long cane, easy to cut and arrange, which is why it's the standard florist rose for occasions like Valentine's Day. Plants grow upright, generally 3 to 6 feet tall, with blooms in nearly every color except blue and black.
Floribunda
Less common but still well known, floribundas (once called hybrid polyanthas before the modern name was adopted in the late 1940s) grow as smaller plants with smaller blooms, typically arriving in clusters rather than singly.
Miniature
Miniature roses scale everything down — bud, foliage, and bloom, with flowers running just 1 to 2 inches. Their compact size makes them equally happy in the ground or in containers, without ever needing to be repotted as they grow.
If you want continuous color through the season rather than a single big flush, floribundas are usually a better pick than hybrid teas — their cluster blooms tend to keep coming.
