Filmed at Hampton Court Palace at the height of the June rose season, Cole & Son's Hampton Roses brings together the voices of craft and cultivation, tracing the thread that connects centuries of pattern-making with the living roses that inspired Hampton Roses and the wider Great Masters collection
Ask any rosarian when to visit Hampton Court's rose gardens, and the answer is unambiguous. June is when the flowers reach their fullest expression; a convergence of warmth, long light, and the accumulated preparation of months. June mornings in the rose gardens are something approaching ceremony, the scent arriving before the colour – sweet, complex, and utterly distinctive.
Head Gardener for both Kensington and Hampton Court Palaces, Graham Dillamore, and his team are loyal custodians to the roses which have been grown in one form or another for over five centuries at Hampton Court. Long before the palace's famous maze or its Tudor chimneys became icons of the English landscape, roses were being cultivated. The tradition stretches back to the reign of King Henry VIII, who took the estate in 1529 and made it a theatre of royal ambition, planting gardens as declarations of power and pleasure in equal measure.
Roses were central to that vision. The Tudor rose, that celebrated the heraldic fusion of the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster, was everywhere at court – stitched onto livery, carved into stonework, and pressed into wax seals. At Hampton Court, the rose was no mere emblem. The living rose, cultivated in formal beds, was both symbol and substance, a flower grown for its beauty as much as its meaning.
Historic Royal Palaces – Great Masters · Hampton Roses
It is this five-hundred-year legacy that inspired Cole & Son's Hampton Roses – a charming floral print evoking the heady summer fragrance of blooming florets nestled within delicate petals. Part of the Great Masters collection of wallcoverings paying homage to the master artisans, craftsmen, and celebrated monarchs who shaped the six iconic royal residences that Historic Royal Palaces now care for. The design draws directly on the rose's particular significance for the Tudors and on the magnificent Rose Garden in full summer abundance.
