Buds are good. After blooming into flowers, the flavor becomes stronger, but the water inside increases a lot, most of the flowers are used to make flavor, or make sauce and so on. The buds are used to make tea.

Our village has a long history of planting roses (search in wikipedia is the hometown of red roses in China), I grew up with my family adults picking roses, come to our village to collect roses as long as it is to do spices or sauce are collected flowers, Xiaokang Beef Sauce to our village to collect flowers. Do tea with the collection are buds.