Roses can be at home with a vegetable garden

QI’ve been having an ongoing “discussion” with my partner about roses and food gardens. One of us is adamant that there is no place for roses in vegetable plots. The other quite likes the idea. Have you given any thought to this issue and have you an opinion?

A. I once read that in monastery gardens, it was traditional to grow a pillar rose at one corner of herb and vegetable plots. I liked the idea, and installed a stout post at a corner of one large vegetable growing area.

The most suitable rose I could easily find at the time was a Don Juan climber that, unlike most climbing roses, blooms well trained in an upright (pillar) shape. The plant yields gorgeous dark red, heavily scented flowers from late spring through much of the autumn. A small-flowered Clematis viticella ‘Alba Luxurians’ twines through the rose and produces white, greentipped flowers.

More roses grow around the periphery of the food garden. This might be a compromise in your situation.

For example, a simple arbour over a path leading into my main vegetable plot houses a yellow-flowered, fragrant climbing miniature rose called Laura Ford, which grows with another Viticella clematis.

Filling a far corner of the food garden, just beyond this year’s tomatoes, is a gigantic Cecile Brunner climber that becomes an immense cloud of lightly scented pink flowers in May and June. And on the opposite side of the food growing area a small bed houses a congregation of roses that include a small-growing climber and the Hybrid Musk roses Buff Beauty and the cluster-flowered Ballerina. Completing the semicircle of roses around the food garden is a wide-ranging Mermaid, a vigorous climber with lemon yellow flowers.

Perhaps those monks were thinking about food for the soul as well as the body.