A good year for roses
Ideal weather conditions have produced a riot of roses – and their elegant, billowing blooms have Monty Don in raptures
ROSES have had a very good year. Like all members of the rose family – and that includes apples, pears, cherries, plums, apricots and hawthorn, among others – they have benefited from the cold winter followed by a warm late spring. They have been through a little wintry rigour and come out refreshed and glowing with health. The upshot is, as I write these words, the garden outside is garlanded with rose petals in shades of pink, white, yellow and red.
Although I grow many roses – well over 100 different ones at last count – and love the climbers and ramblers that are spilling elegantly out of the branches of my orchard and festooning the walls, my heart really belongs to the old-fashioned shrub roses that are mainly planted in my Cottage Garden. Their soft and careless abandon makes them ideally suited to that loose, inclusive style of gardening. These are shrubs that have to be allowed to billow and sprawl in a way that no hybrid tea could imagine.
They have to be able to dominate the garden while they last because – again, unlike hybrid tea roses – they are by and large single-flowering, although some will have a second, more modest flourish in late summer. This, the first half of July, is their hour – when they are king and queen of the garden.
Roses are, apparently, everyone’s favourite flower. Why would they not be? But there are so many different kinds of roses and so many different colours and forms within those kinds that it is a bit like saying that soup is our favourite food or that being happy is our favourite pastime.
It needs defining and refining. The reason I love the old classic shrub roses is that they combine exquisite flowers with often handsome foliage on really useful shrubs. They are perfect as part of a border, in among semi-woodland planting or as a display in their own right, perhaps complemented by bulbs, clematis and annuals.
They also have real floral poetry. The gallicas, damasks, bourbons, centifolias, mosses, albas, rugosas, portlands, and hybrid perpetuals form a varied and infinitely fascinating selection of hundreds of different roses that all share that same magic and romance. There is nothing spiky or harsh about them. These are the roses of warm sultry nights and of blowsy gardens overspilling with scent and soft colour.
I find it impossible to select any one that I like best but at random, in my garden now, I am seduced by the overlapping petals of a centifolia like ‘Chapeau de Napoléon’, the delicate blushing pink of ‘Cuisse de Nymphe’ or the pure white of ‘Madame Hardy’, with her green eye at the heart of the ruffle of petals.
I never tire of the sliced-off flowers of ‘Charles de Mills’ or the deep plumcoloured burgundy flowers of the hybrid perpetual ‘Souvenir du Dr Jamain’ that will grow happiest in deep shade.
The sheer beauty of these flowers is reason enough to go to great lengths to grow them, but few plants are as trouble-free. Gallicas, albas and rugosa roses are very tough shrubs and will grow in almost any soil or position.
All roses do well in heavy clay soils and most of the classic roses will flower happily in full sun or part shade, with a few – like ‘Souvenir du Dr Jamain’ or ‘Madame Plantier’ – that actually prefer shade.
Finally, the best tip I have for prolonging flowering is to prune your roses every day.
Yes, you read that right. Do not just pull off the spent flowers but use a pair of sharp secateurs and cut back to the next leaf or bud, however far down the stem that might be.
This will not only remove the fading petals but also stimulate more side shoots and more flowers.