ROSE-COLOURED SPECTACLES

The first yellow roses were out earlier than ever this year. And with a little planning, you can enjoy dazzling displays all summer FOUR-PAGE GARDENING PULLOUT

MY favourite roses are those that appear first of all. They have both the freshness of spring and the heady promise of summer attached to them.

My garden is fairly cold and yet we still had the climbing rose ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ in flower on May Day and the wonderful yellow species roses, Rosa hugonis and R. cantabrigiensis, were in full swing by then, having started flowering a week earlier.

But over the years these things generally even themselves out. While climate change undoubtedly is affecting our gardens, bringing spring a week or more earlier than when I was a child, in general you can plan for your earliest roses to start flowering in early May and to be at their best around the beginning of the third week in May, just as the more familiar roses of summer get going. This contia nuity and transference is what I love and with a little research and planning is easy to achieve.

The primrose-coloured flowers of R. cantabrigiensis and R. hugonis are simple things - single, small and, on the face of it, plain. But their massed effect is stunning, with their simplicity an unqualified virtue so the bush retains a lightness despite being smothered in flower.

This elegance is reinforced by the ferny delicacy of their foliage. I cannot recommend these two roses highly enough. Both are remarkably simple to grow, require very little pruning (just cut back any crossing or straggly stems after flowering), are ideal for growing spring flowers underneath and, like the bulbs beneath, are as tough as old boots.

Toughness is a feature of all species roses. These are the unbred (but not ill-bred), unadorned plants that nature has provided and far removed from the opulent intensity of many highly cultivated varieties, although I love these as well. A species rose I must add to my own garden is R. primula, the incense rose. The ferny leaves of this shrub have the fragrance of incense and the pale yellow flowers are also strongly scented.

A species climber that I know I could not grow in my garden is the lovely R. banksiae ‘Lutea’, the yellow banksia. On a trip to Italy I saw this rose everywhere, sprawling over pergolas and walls with easy abandon.

But it is not very hardy, and although it might survive the rigours of an Irish winter our high incidence of late frosts would do for the flowers if not the plant itself.

But if you have a sheltered, sunny wall and are reasonably free of frosts after early April, then it makes the most wonderful climber, smothered with small buttercup-yellow flowers.

R. banksiae ‘Lutea’ is massed with petals, whereas R. banksia ‘Lutescens’ has flowers that are little larger and more sweetly scented but single.

The best-known early yellow rose is probably Rosa xanthina ‘Canary Bird’, which has rather darker foliage than R. hugonis (one of its parents) and intense yellow flowers.

One of the characteristics of this rose is that it adapts well to being trained as a standard. If you do grow ‘Canary Bird’ like this — or indeed any rose as a standard — it will require extra care, and nothing is more effective for giving it a boost than putting a really generous mulch of garden compost around the base every winter, and again after flowering in early June.