🌥️ Why Pantone® Color of the Year Cloud Dancer™ & White Roses Are a Match Made in Heaven
Written By Gracielinda Poulson, Founder & Creative Director
This year, Pantone®’s pick for Color of the Year is Cloud Dancer™, “a soft, billowy white,” chosen for its ability to act as an “offering of calm, clarity and a fresh start.”
Cloud Dancer™ isn’t a cold, sterile white. Rather, it’s a gentle, unbleached white, airy, serene, and seasonally agnostic. This subtle white sets the perfect mood for a garden filled with white roses: purity, elegance, and a quiet, timeless beauty. White roses, in their many shades and shapes, become an embodied expression of Cloud Dancer’s™ spirit: a living canvas for reflection, renewal, and calm. With that in mind, here are 10 standout white roses from GRF that harmonize beautifully with Cloud Dancer’s™ ethos. I’ve noted for each the fragrance, growth habit, and bloom characteristics so you have a feel for how they’d perform (and feel) in your garden.
🌹 GRF’s Top 10 White Roses for a Cloud Dancer™ Garden
Arborose® Honeymoon™
Arborose® Honeymoon™ blooms in dreamy, cloud-soft clusters that trail gracefully along arches and trellises, creating the most enchanting garden moments. Each flower carries a fresh, classic fragrance that feels effortlessly romantic, like a whisper of summer drifting on the breeze.
- General Impression: A delicate, graceful white rose that’s ideal if you want a romantic, soft-spoken white presence.
- Growth Habit: As an “Arborose®,” Honeymoon™ Arborose® is perfect for trellises, arbors, or pergolas, adding vertical drama to your space.
- Bloom & Fragrance: Honeymoon™ carries a gentle, old-rose, fresh, clean scent. Expect medium to large blooms with abundant petals, evoking a soft-white cloud, born in clusters that billow off the plant.
- Why It’s a Cloud Dancer™ Rose: The airy, climbing/arching form of Honeymoon™ evokes a sense of drifting elegance, like clouds grazing through a garden.
Bolero™ unfurls luxurious, creamy-white blooms with a rich, classic fragrance that stops you in your tracks. Its compact, beautifully shaped shrub is endlessly generous with petals, making every garden corner feel romantic, refined, and deeply fragrant.
- General Impression: A refined white rose, ideal for classic garden beds or mixed borders.
- Growth Habit: Bolero™ is a compact rose with a manageable height, suitable for hedges or garden edges.
- Bloom & Fragrance: Large creamy-white blooms with strong, deep, true rose fragrance.
- Why It’s a Cloud Dancer™ Rose: With its neat shape and clean white petals, Bolero™ offers quiet sophistication, like a minimalist white canvas in your garden.
Queen Mary 2® stands regally in the garden, its luminous white blooms unfolding with a plush elegance worthy of its namesake. The rose’s rich, unexpected banana fragrance and stately form make every stem feel like a true luxury moment.Queen Mary 2® stands regally in the garden, its luminous white blooms unfolding with a plush elegance worthy of its namesake. The rose’s rich, unexpected banana fragrance and stately form make every stem feel like a true luxury moment.
- General Impression: Regal, structured rose with large blooms suited for statement planting.
- Growth Habit: Upright growth with blooms that sit atop a well foliated plant.
- Bloom & Fragrance: Big heads of white petals with rich banana fragrance.
- Why It’s a Cloud Dancer™ Rose: Its stately structure and pure white blooms give a sense of refined calm, like a cloud’s soft, sculpted form hanging in a still sky.
Eden Climber® White graces the garden with romantic, cupped blooms that seem to float along nearly thornless canes like soft white ribbons. Its gentle fragrance and dreamy, cascading habit transform walls and arches into storybook scenes filled with timeless beauty.
- General Impression: A classic climbing rose with timeless white blooms, ideal for arbors, pergolas, or garden walls.
- Growth Habit: Eden Climber® White brings vertical movement and can turn a plain fence or wall into a dreamy white backdrop.
- Bloom & Fragrance: Deeply cupped blooms born in spays on nearly thornless stems with gentle fragrance.
- Why It’s a Cloud Dancer™ Rose: As climbers ascend skyward, they echo the feeling of drifting clouds, bringing airy verticality and elegance to the garden space.
Icecap™ blooms in abundant waves of pure white flowers that blanket the shrub like freshly fallen snow. Its clean, light fragrance and naturally tidy shape make it a beautifully reliable rose that brightens every garden space with effortless charm.
- General Impression: A compact, prolific white floribunda that is perfect for borders, containers, or low-maintenance gardens.
- Growth Habit: Compact shrub, about 2–3 ft high according to sources.
- Bloom & Fragrance: Double white flowers emerging from pale pink buds; bloom is pure white, dense, and repeated frequently throughout the season. Fragrance is light and clean.
- Why It’s a Cloud Dancer™ Rose: Icecap’s™ pure white, cloud-like blooms and dense, cushiony shape evoke the hush of a low white cloud, a soft neutral anchor in any garden palette.
Veranda® White charms with perfectly shaped white blooms that glow softly against its compact, glossy foliage. Effortless and refined, it brings a touch of quiet elegance to patios, borders, and beds, blooming with the kind of grace that elevates any garden space.
- General Impression: A clean, classic white rose that is suitable for mixed beds, cottage-style gardens, or formal rose borders.
- Growth Habit: A compact, bush shrub.
- Bloom & Fragrance: Expect well-formed white blooms, perhaps a bit creamy; fragrance is subtle, aligning with a refined, understated vibe.
- Why It’s a Cloud Dancer™ Rose: Veranda® White brings structured balance, its steady form and gentle tone mirror Cloud Dancer’s™ soft neutrality.
Cloud 10™ bursts with billowing, cup-shaped white blooms that climb and cascade like a soft cloudbank drifting along the garden. Its lush, romantic abundance transforms arbors and fences into ethereal floral sculptures that feel straight out of a dream.
- General Impression: A heavy-blooming white climber, perfect if you want abundant, dramatic white roses cascading over arbors, fences, or pergolas.
- Growth Habit: Climber that lends vertical dimension and a lush, romantic look.
- Bloom & Fragrance: Prolific pure white blooms; while fragrance is light, the emphasis is on volume and mass of blooms.
- Why It’s a Cloud Dancer™ Rose: The name alone evokes airy, sky-like softness. In bloom, it can turn a vertical space into a cloudscape, living petals swirling like drifting vapor.
Eleganza® LaPerla™ opens in luminous, pearl-toned blooms that feel both sophisticated and irresistibly soft. Each flower carries a quiet, refined beauty that brings a couture-like elegance to every garden and arrangement.
- General Impression: A refined rose varietal bred for elegance, form, and slightly creamy white petals.
- Growth Habit: Presumably a well-mannered shrub, versatile enough for mixed borders or standalone rose beds.
- Bloom & Fragrance: Expect full, well-formed blooms; fragrance is light to moderate, leaning toward sophistication over bold scent.
- Why It’s a Cloud Dancer™ Rose: Eleganza® LaPerla™ speaks to subtlety, grace, and quiet beauty, the floral equivalent of soft white linen, echoing the breezy calm Cloud Dancer™ inspires.
Top Cream™ unfurls sumptuous, ivory-cream petals that glow with warm, romantic softness in every light. Its full, velvety blooms and rich, true-rose fragrance make it a luxurious standout, adding depth and elegance to both the garden and the bouquet.
- General Impression: A creamy-white rose, slightly richer in tone than a pure snow white, offering warmth and subtle sophistication.
- Growth Habit: A large. Upright shrub, suitable for adding a touch of softness to a garden without dominating.
- Bloom & Fragrance: Blooms lean toward off-white or creamy tones; fragrance is a deep, true rose scent.
- Why It’s a Cloud Dancer™ Rose: Just as Cloud Dancer™ isn’t a harsh white but a soft neutral, Top Cream™ offers a slightly warmer white, ideal if you want a cozy, inviting white rose presence that still feels serene and light.
Shirley’s Bouquet™ offers luminous white blooms with a soft blush glow in cool weather, each petal unfolding with nostalgic, romantic charm. Its intensely fragrant flowers and dark, elegant foliage make every stem feel like a timeless garden treasure.
- General Impression: A large, sturdy petaled rose with soft pink glowing from the center in cool weather.
- Growth Habit: A dark foliated shrub, suitable for cottage-style gardens or intimate rose beds.
- Bloom & Fragrance: Expect large blooms with soft white petals, borne in clusters and singles, with very intense fragrance.
- Why It’s a Cloud Dancer™ Rose: The softly romantic vibe of Shirley’s Bouquet®, delicate, unassuming, serene, captures the spirit of Cloud Dancer™: calm, gentle, graceful.
🪴 Designing Your Garden with Cloud Dancer™ Whites
- Layer textures & heights: Use climbers like Arborose® Honeymoon™, Eden Climber® White, or Cloud 10™ for vertical drama; compact shrubs like Icecap™ or Bolero™ for front of the garden or pathway border structure; and medium bushes like Queen Mary 2®, Top Cream™, Shirley's Bouquet™, or Eleganza® LaPerla™ for the middle of the garden bed as focal points.
- Think of it as a white-on-white palette: Just as Cloud Dancer™ isn’t sterile but soft, planting a variety of whites, from pure snow to creamy off-white, will give depth and interest without breaking the gentle mood.
- Let simplicity shine: White roses under soft morning or dusk light often reflect subtle shades, the same subtlety that makes Cloud Dancer™ so appealing. A garden in whites can feel like a living canvas: peaceful, clean, luminous.
✨ In Closing…
In a world often saturated with bold color, loud design, and constant activity, there is something deeply grounding about returning to white. By planting a garden of elegant white roses, each with its own personality, growth habit, and bloom form, you can create a space that doesn’t demand attention but invites pause, reflection, and calm. A white-on-white rose garden is more than aesthetic: it’s a sanctuary.
