3 steps to rose heaven

Deryn loves roses, and has filled her garden with climbers, Hybrid Teas and miniatures. Here are some of her favourite ways to grow them.

✱ TRELLIS Roses make great screening plants, and can be trained up a trellis and along a fence line. Deryn has ‘Lamarque’, with clusters of violet-scented white flowers and few thorns, ‘Souvenir de Madame Léonie Viennot’, a

Tea Rose with coppery pink flowers, mostly in late winter to spring, which repeat flowers, and ‘Crépuscule’, a virtually thornless rose with masses of small, apricot-yellow flowers.

✱ SWAG Growing roses on a swag, which is a chain or rope strung between posts or columns, can delineate areas within a garden. This is also a good use of space, as other plants can be grown underneath the trailing rose. Deryn uses climbing ‘China Doll’, with trusses of hot pink, double flowers, for this purpose, and she says that climbing ‘Pinkie’, which has pale pink, semi-double blooms, works well, too.

✱ POLE Deryn grows roses on a pole to add height, but not shade in her garden. ‘Penelope’, a Hybrid Musk rose from 1924, has the perfect shape for a pole (see page 21). It has coppery salmon-tinted buds that open to perfumed, creamy pink, semi-double flowers, which have prominent yellow stamens that fade to white.