The Most Expensive Flowers in the World Are As Beautiful As You'd Imagine

They say that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet—and that particularly applies to the David Austin Juliet rose, which is sometimes called the £3 million rose.

David Austin was a world-famous rose breeder who fell in love with roses in the 1940s and started his own company in 1969. Since then, Austin has introduced more than 200 new varieties of his signature English roses to the world.

The gorgeous Juliet (Ausjameson) rose, which is an internationally popular choice for weddings, earned its price tag because of how much it cost Austin to create this hybrid over fifteen years of work.

The breed made its debut in 2006 at the iconic Chelsea Flower Show, where it won accolades for its beauty and fame for its price. Two other varieties were introduced at the same time, but Juliet’s ongoing popularity has stood the test of time.

Austin aimed to combine the cup shape of older styles of roses with a range of new colours. He also wanted the flower to have the ability of new rose varieties to flower repeatedly.

As a result, Juliet roses have an old-fashioned cupped-rose shape that becomes more beautiful as they open further. They have a distinctive and quite unusual peach colour that gets darker and warmer in an ombre style towards the centre. The scent of these roses is luscious and floral.

Austin’s cut roses have been developed to withstand long-distance transport and to have a long vase life. No wonder brides the world over continuously choose them for their big day.

“My aim in breeding English Roses has been to develop a rose for more elusive characteristics such as charm and unique character, rather than to focus on attaining measurable factors like greater size of flower or brighter colours, as has often been the case in the past,” Austin said of his love of the flower.

“My English Roses are available in a wide range of pure, glowing colours, from the softest blush pinks and creams to yellows and apricots, right through to the deepest, richest crimsons. When I started breeding roses, other breeders were allowing the fragrance to disappear, so I embarked on a quest to restore scent to the modern rose.

“I love them all for very different reasons – although Juliet and Patience have a particularly special place in my heart, as they were the first cut rose varieties that made an impression and gave us the belief that we were creating something special. It is these two varieties that are possibly the most widely recognised as being David Austin cut roses.”

Alongside Juliet, there are several other flowers with hefty price tags that may surprise you:

A Few of the Most Expensive Flowers

Kadupul Flower

The Kadupul flower, from a cactus, doesn’t technically have a price tag, since it’s never actually been sold—it blooms just once a year, always at night, and is always dead before the next day. It’s sometimes called a ghost flower, and can only be found in Sri Lanka.

Rotschild’s Slipper Orchid

The Rothschild’s slipper orchid will set you back more than $6,000 a plant, which feels like a lot considering it takes years for a flower to bloom. It was discovered in 1987 in the Kinabalu National Park in Malaysia, the only place it grows naturally, and is often called the Gold of Kinabalu orchid.

Shenzhen Nongke Orchid

The most expensive flower ever sold is the Shenzhen Nongke Orchid, which was bought at auction in 2005 for $290,000. It was developed by Chinese agricultural scientists at Shenzhen Nongke University, which is where it gets its name. The scientists worked on it for eight years and the flower itself only blooms every four or five years.

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