'I was utterly bewitched': The heartwarming success story of one of Britain's greatest rose-growers

It is always a pleasure to hear a success story in horticulture. Forty years ago, Trevor White gave up a promising career as a microbiologist to start up a nursery and pursue his love for old roses. His Norfolk-based business, producing and selling thousands of old roses every year, has delighted keen rose growers and brought him a fine sense of achievement, a modest degree of prosperity and great happiness.

White, now in his sixties, was brought up at Egham in Surrey where, throughout the past century, dozens of nurseries flourished on the local soil, Bagshot sand. A holiday job when he was a teenager took him to the great wholesale nursery of T. Hilling & Co in Chobham, where Graham Stuart-Thomas had been the general manager from 1939–55. When he matriculated at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, however, White started to do part-time and seasonal work for Peter Beales. Beales was for many years Britain’s leading specialist in old roses — gallicas, damasks, moss roses and the like — and his nursery at Attleborough in Norfolk is still well-known to rose-lovers today.

After he graduated, White intended to work in veterinary research, but Beales offered him a full-time job among roses, which changed the direction of his working life forever. ‘If I was in love with the rose before,’ he says, ‘I was now utterly bewitched.’ Beales was a good manager of people, but perhaps not so successful in managing a commercial undertaking. After a couple of years, during which Beales took him to help on his stand at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, White decided to set up his own business, propagating roses for sale.

It was not an easy venture — he had no capital, so, to make ends meet, he took on part-time jobs, such as budding roses for some of the large nurseries around Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. For his first crop of 10,000 roses, he had to plant all the rootstocks himself and use his spade to dig up the finished roses when they were ready for sale 18 months later. The following year, he budded 16,000 roses and, in the third year, 22,000. Nowadays, all the roses are undercut mechanically before being lifted.

Selling his roses turned out to be fairly easy. White was correct in his belief that demand would be strong and decided from the start that he would operate only as a wholesaler. Not only was he able to sell some of his roses back to Beales, but he soon found that garden centres were interested in what he could offer — as were several grand gardens, famous for their roses, that were open to the public and wanted roses to sell to their visitors. Cranborne Manor in Dorset, Heale House in Wiltshire and the great rose garden at the National Trust’s Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire were among his first customers.

His plants were well grown, healthy and competitively priced — people who remember his roses from those early days say he has been a consistent supplier of high-quality stock.

Starting up a business is hard work and roses are horribly prickly from start to finish. The nurseryman’s year begins with buying and planting rootstocks; White uses the ‘Laxa’ variety — popular because it throws up fewer of those suckers that baffle and irritate gardeners. Budding them is a tedious, difficult and exhausting operation, usually carried out in the sun and heat of July. A single dormant bud is taken from the parent plant, inserted into a T-shaped cut at the base of the rootstock and then sealed so that the stock accepts it.

White reckons he can bud about 2,000 roses a day and hope for a good ‘take’, typically more than 95%. In winter, all the top growth is cut back to a point just above the sealed bud, so that, in spring, the stock will put all its energy into making that bud grow. More shocks await the plant, because it will be pruned very hard, almost to ground level, at the end of May, to encourage the new growth to bush out, make a shapely plant and flower for the first time towards the end of July. It can then be lifted for sale in autumn.

‘Forty years on and, remarkably, we’re still here,’ says White, not rich, but comfortable. He and his wife, Vanessa, have raised four children, all of whom helped in the nursery. Family holidays were difficult, because a nurseryman’s work is never done. Today, when their children reflect upon their upbringing, they much admire their parents’ work ethic.

Some years ago, their son Henry, now in his mid-thirties, announced that he would like to continue to develop the business. He left a career in television management, trained at RHS Wisley in Surrey, worked at Fulham Palace Garden Centre — London’s best — and came home to Norfolk full of energy, talent and new ideas. Then came covid. Sales plummeted. Garden centres were empty of buyers, but full of unsold stock. White Jnr saw that the only way forward was to move quickly from wholesale sales to retail and to sell their roses online. The decision has transformed the business; online sales now account for 95% of the company’s turnover.

White Snr’s devotion to old roses has never wavered, but he quickly recognised the excellence of David Austin’s roses, which evolved from crossing old roses with modern varieties to combine the best features of both — the shape and scent of old roses with the repeat-flowering habit of modern ones. He also admired roses in the Austin style that were developed by foreign nurserymen, notably the Renaissance line from Poulsen in Denmark, the Nostalgic roses of Tantau in Germany and others from Delbard in France. He therefore bought budwood from all these Continental pioneers to propagate their varieties and add them to his own list.

He can no longer bud ‘English’ roses because David Austin has taken propagation in-house, but he believes that many Austin roses that are now out of patent are nevertheless very good garden plants. Therefore, he has built up a fine list of strongly scented ‘early English’ roses, such as super-vigorous ‘Leander’, dark-red ‘Othello’ and compact ‘Pretty Jessica’, which are no longer offered by Austin.

He has also begun to breed a few roses of his own, growing them from seed and selecting the best for introduction. Characteristically modest about his achievements, he is proud of a compact, lemon-yellow Hybrid Tea, peach-scented and very healthy, that he introduced in 2018 and named ‘Esme’ for one of his daughters.

White sells nearly 600 different varieties, four-fifths of them as bare-root plants, ready for planting in winter and early spring. The stocks that remain at the end of the planting season are potted up and sold in their pots for the rest of the year. Thus, with young Henry in charge, White can start to relax and start work upon one more project — making the rose garden that he promised his wife more than 40 years ago, but which, just for the moment, remains unmade.

Visit the Trevor White Roses website to find out more.

This feature originally appeared in the January 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.