Mrs Oakley Fisher (or Squatter's Dream!)

According to my simplistic scribbled garden "maps" of the 1990s (which as well as being terrible to begin with, have also been left out in the rain several times and are very hard to decipher), I planted two roses next to each other in the garden bed where the rose pictured above is situated...Mrs Oakley Fisher and the Alister Clark rose Squatter's Dream. Only one of these roses survived to see in the new millennium, but whether it was MOF or SD I am unsure.

Online photographs of the two roses have me favouring Mrs Oakley Fisher for its identity, although it has grown much taller than "normal". I think this is because its survival mechanism has kicked in, however...surrounding it are huge sprawly tea roses, and to get any sunlight at all this rose has had to reach for the sky and send its branches upwards.

Whatever the case, be she English or a home-grown Australian, this is a truly beautiful rose.