Name:  Rosa ‘Meibenbino’ aka The Petite Knock Out Rose

Type of Plant:  A miniature shrub rose with red flowers and the same ease and disease resistance of other plants in the Knock Out line from Star Roses and Plants.

Why I Love This Plant: This rose bush only grows to about 18” tall and wide, making it a perfect choice for containers or for grouping in gardens where you need a plant to stay shorter. Want roses in your foundation planting that will stay under some rather low windows? Petite Knock Out is the Rosa for you…and because they stay small they’ll not only be under the windows, but you’ll probably be able to plant a group of 3 or more for a nice show of flowers all summer.

A Word to the Wise:   I was sent two of these landscape roses to try last summer. I was glad to have two, because I could plant one in a pot on my deck and another in my trail garden. The one on my deck was fertilized and watered regularly, and I clipped off the spent flowers when they were finished. But the one in the trial garden I just planted and watered once every week to ten days. Both plants repeatedly bloomed through the summer, and both had clean, glossy green foliage with no sign of blackspot.

Although deadheading isn’t necessary on these shrubs to produce more flowers, I do think that it improves the look of the plant, especially if you have these in containers on decks and patios where people will see them up close.

This was a small plant when I put it into a container early in the summer. It got full and bushy all on its own, with no pruning or shaping needed…and you can see how Petite Knockout was pushing out many flowers. 

This is a closeup of the foliage on the plant in my trial garden. The leaves stayed a glossy green with no sign of blackspot or mildew. This plant didn’t get deadheaded (the flowers you see here are ready to be clipped off if I was deadheading this plant) but it continued to produce flowers anyway. Like all roses, Petite Knock Out seems to benefit from fertilization. Had I fertilized this plant, I suspect that it would have made more flowers – the one in the pot that was planted with time-release fertilizer had slightly more blooms on it than the trial garden plant. But I wanted to see what Petite Knock Out did in just average garden soil, and it showed me that it would be a winner for someone who neglected to fertilize as long as the soil was fairly fertile.

Looking for the perfect rose for pots on a sunny deck? Meet Petite! The Petite Knock Out rose.