A complex class of roses bred over many decades in the last century. Initially crosses of Damask Perpetual or Portland types with China roses, they combine attributes of the old European classes. Most are richly fragrant, with some notable exceptions among the dark red HPs, and present a palette from white through pinks, lavenders and crimsons to darkest maroon-black. The Victorians became as mad about these roses as the seventeenth-century Dutch were about tulips, and created entire societies around the rose for the first time, focussing on exhibition and competition, which changed forever the way human beings look at roses. The obsession over the perfection of the individual bloom is still with us today in the continued modern focus on Hybrid Tea roses, the largest-flowered of all modern rose groups.