In youth, in my gardening youth which began around 1986 when we moved to a large corner garden in Kerrisdale, I was obsessed with the proper identification of all my plants. It started with hostas. 

Someone might have told me, "I have this green hosta with a white edge…” I would not have let them finish as I would say, “There are at least 300 hostas with that appearance.”

Now in my dotage I do not find it all that important. I like (we like as I must include my Rosemary here) to keep our plants looking as good as they can. We identify most of them with metal labels. 

There are some exceptions.

There is this floriferous rose in bloom right now. The blooms are red, very fragrant and they soon open up to show yellow stamens. With that in mind there are many (as in many) roses with those characteristics. There is one procedure that this rose will perform. It will either bloom again later in the season (this will define it as a remontant rose) or it will not. That should help in narrowing the gap for a possible identification.

Brenda Viney (very active she is) former President of the Vancouver Rose Society has opined that the rose could be Rosa ‘Doctor Huey’. This rose (much like the picture here) was used and is still used as a root stock to graft other roses. For some years the roses some of us would buy in Vancouver (which might have come from California where the doctor was popular) would die because the Dr. Huey root stock would have trouble with our wet winters.

Viney believes that this rose which we liberated from our former garden (Rosemary likes to return) may have been the root stock of a plant that did not make it. Dr. Huey is not remontant.

Time will tell. But it really is not that important. The rose is healthy, beautiful, well scented. What more can I ask?