Alexandra Farms Names Rose Honoring Holly Chapple
By Jill Brooke
Considering that floral designer and educator Holly Heider Chapple is such a champion of garden roses, how wonderful that Alexandra Farms created a special rose in her honor.
It’s a “wonderfully imposing peach-colored bloom,” owner Joey Azzout says. In fact, Princess Holly’s Hope was selected by Holly as her signature garden rose during a visit to Alexandra Farms in early 2020.
Transitioning from a soft peachy-toned center to creamy outer petals, this sizable ruffle-cup bloom is classified as “very full” in terms of petal count, as it has over 80 petals. Princess Holly’s Hope opens fully and holds astoundingly well with a strength and resilience that reminds us of our friend.
Princess Holly’s Hope is available now through floral wholesalers, with limited availability. Production is expected to increase throughout 2024. No doubt brides will also be taking pictures in arches enveloped with these beautiful blooms too.
The ebullient Holly, who we featured in Florists Review Magazine as a female dynamo, attributes much of the acclaim she received in the early years of her career to the use of Alexandra Farms garden roses in her design work. “Juliet and Patience (from David Austin Roses) made me fall in love with garden roses and established my brand and changed the trajectory of my company because we started focusing on these luxury flowers,” she says. Her expertise and appreciation for garden roses eventually cemented a partnership with Alexandra Farms when she met our company president, Jose (Joey) R. Azout, at the American Institute of Floral Designers’ 2018 Symposium.
So you never know when you plant seeds and how they will bloom at an AIFD event.
Holly attributes much of her success to being immensely resourceful in finding new branches for her business to create profits and buzz. When she needed a design armature solution to create flowers effectively and sustainably, she developed her own “egg” and “pillow” apparatus that she now sells to other florists and enthusiasts.
As she admits, her mind constantly races with new ideas and processes. After successfully running her floral and event design business from her home-based studio for 27 years, she moved her operation to Hope Flower Farm in Loudoun County, Virginia. The farm was purchased in 2015 to be her educational facility and to grow flowers for her sought-after wedding and event design business.
Holly, and her husband and business partner Evan Chapple, visited Alexandra Farms in February 2020. There she saw what is one of the world’s best breeding laboratories on earth. She was drawn to several test varieties in the greenhouses before selecting three blooms as her favorites.
The rose is also a lovely memory of her late husband Evan who died in 2022.
What Holly particularly loves about Princess Holly’s Hope is how the variety opens, mimicking a large and striking star. “Her nuance in shape and variations in shades” are thrilling, she says. “I’m a lover of the ‘in-betweens’ and rarely look for a single-tone flower. [Princess Holly’s Hope] is a jewel in the industry.”
Azout agrees that this garden rose stands out from others because of her originality. “She’s not a traditionally shaped variety, considering Holly’s classical design,” he says. “The fact that she was inclined to select this flower shows Holly’s true versatility and ability to envision something beautiful in a more modern style.”
Plus this flower will be a welcome addition to Alexandra Farms’ prized Princess Garden Roses Collection with a classically stunning new variety.
As Therese of Lisieux observed, “If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness.” “Welcome to the world Princess Holly’s Hope®.
Jill Brooke is a former CNN correspondent, Post columnist and editor-in-chief of Avenue and Travel Savvy magazine. She is an author and the editorial director of FPD and a contributor to Florists Review magazine. She also won the 2023 AIFD (American Institute of Floral Design.) Merit Award for showing how flowers impact history, news and culture
Photo Credit: Alexandra Farms