Rainbow Knockout®

This rose's location in the garden is SE 09.
  • Classification: Shrub
  • Flower Color:  pink blend
  • Flower Size:  2 inch
  • Flower Form:  flat
  • Petal Count:  5-6
  • Fragrance:  slight spice
  • Repeat Bloomer:  yes
  • Foliage:  medium green
  • Plant Height:  3 feet
  • Plant Width:  2 feet
  • Growth Habit:  round bushy
  • Disease Resistant:  no
  • Hybridizer:  William Radler
  • Registered:  2007
  • Parentage:  ‘Radtee’ x ‘Radral’
  • ARS* Rating:  7.5 (A good rose.)
    *American Rose Society Rating

Awards:
  • 2007 AARS (All-America Rose Selections) award
 
Notes:
  • This rose is in the Knock Out® family of easy care, disease resistant roses, excellent for landscapes and for those who want season-long bloom with little maintenance. The Knock Out® rose revolutionized the interest in landscape roses because of its easy care and disease resistance.  Since its introduction, the hybridizer, William Radler has introduced a range of varieties in the Knock Out® series with different flower colors. He has also introduced many other hardy, disease resistant roses. Other William Radler roses in the garden are Knock Out® and Double Knock Out®.

  • “Will Radler was still just an amateur rose breeder — a basement hobbyist, really — when he walked out of his home in Milwaukee carrying that fateful baby rose in a soil-stuffed cup. He didn’t realize it then, back in 1989, but he held in his hands a flower with such remarkable qualities that it would grow to be the best-selling garden rose in the country. His creation is credited with reversing the sagging fortunes of the difficult garden queen.

  • Radler’s rose is so hardy and requires so little care that it can be planted in places once unimaginable — road medians, mall parking lots, ignored gardens. Radler’s rose is called the Knock Out. It changed the entire rose industry by emphasizing low-maintenance. It still dominates the market. Radler believed the problem was the rose had been overbred for beauty. The modern rose had transformed from just five petals and once-a-year blooms to dozens of petals — hundreds even — and multiple blooms. But this tinkering also made the flower fragile, like a sickly award-winning dog. Radler wanted to make roses easier.” --- The Washington Post, “By any other name, the Knock Out rose would be just as sturdy”, July 15, 2015.