Plant a new rose in the month of May
May is the perfect month for planting a new rose.
Roses ordered from nurseries should begin arriving this month.
The soil is still warm, so root growth will be quick and bushes will be off to a head start.
The most important thing you will ever do for a rose is planting it, so it pays to do it correctly.
Choose a spot that gets the sun for at least half the day and dig a hole bigger than you think you will need; deep enough for the bud union (where the branches meet at the base of the plant) to be well covered with soil when you have finished the job, watered the plant well and heeled down the soil. Make sure the plant doesn’t dry out, watering (slowly) every three days if necessary.
I have just learned about an interesting rose referred to as The Harris Rose.
A friend brought me a few blooms which I immediately identified as ‘Perle d’Or’.
‘‘Well, we don’t know,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s called The Harris Rose and it was brought to New Zealand from England by my ancestors, tucked into a potato to keep it alive.’’
Her great-great-grandparents Sofia and Jacob Harris arrived in Wellington in 1840 on the Bolton, and settled in Taita where they established a sawmill.
But Jacob had been a professional gardener on a large estate in England and gardening runs through the Harris family.
The potato plant cutting flourished and cuttings from the original bush have been handed down through each generation.
The problem lies in the naming. Flowers, foliage and habit of growth are precisely like ‘Perle d’Or’.
But how can that be when ‘Pearl d’Or’ didn’t exist in 1840? It had been bred in France by Joseph Rambaux in 1875 and introduced by Francis Dubreuil in 1883. How could it be the rose that landed in Wellington in 1840?
I don’t know how much work has been done here (petal counts and such). Perhaps we should just appreciate the blooms?
But ‘Perle d’Or’ is well worth growing.
The flowers are charming and packed full of petals in various shades of creamy amber or apricot.
Its parents are a multiflora rambler and the lovely ‘ Mme Falcot’. It flowers generously and you can keep it as a small bush or let it grow to about two metres. And while ‘Ce´cile Bru¨nner’ has beautiful buds, ‘Perle d’Or’ has better flowers.
Don’t write off a rose because the flowers are small. Often roses with smaller flowers are easier to place in the garden – and a vase – than the many-petalled beauties.
‘May Queen’ has a flush of deep pink flowers in summer and there seems to be always a few flowers which often stay on all winter.
‘Irene Watts’ has fragrant blooms that are cream flushed with pink in a loosely double form and the bush doesn’t grow to more than a metre, which make it the perfect rose for a small garden.
- NZ Gardener