About us

Breeding and plant production

Breeding and most production of garden roses take place at the Sparrieshoop site. All types of garden roses, such as climbers, shrub roses, hybrid teas, patio roses, shrublets and floribunda are bred here, with cut roses for greenhouse and outdoor planting, alongside the creation of new pot roses, also performed at other sites in Germany.

A total of 25 million roses are produced every year at Sparrieshoop, which are delivered to private and trade customers from January to December as bare-rooted roses or in Plant-o-fix-pots^®. In the summer, flowering container roses are sold directly to visitors or shipped to customers all over the world.

In the 1990s, adapting to a new focus on healthy and disease-resistant garden roses, W. Kordes' Söhne implemented a complete moratorium on the use of fungicides on test fields. The initial results of this decision returned few benefits, indeed it seemed more a complete disaster through a blight of black spot causing defoliation to nearly the entire stock. Nevertheless, with perseverance and what seemed against all odds, several test varieties displayed extremely high levels of robustness and disease resistance, providing hope for the future. Many of these varieties were the product of novel strains and paved the way to a new generation of roses with outstanding plant health and disease resistance properties.