Amazing floral art

Create three stunning arrangements

Almost everyone adores a rose. Well, most people do. I recently spoke to a bride who announced that she didn’t like roses and didn’t want them anywhere near her wedding. How can she resist the sheer beauty of a heavenly scented, blowsy garden rose? I’m presuming she’s never come into contact with one.

To be fair, we could probably live without the soulless roses you often find in supermarkets. With their tight buds, stiff stems, solid petals and waxy leaves, they could be plastic. So let’s pretend that’s what the bride was talking about and move on to the proper, beautiful garden roses that you can’t not love.

It’s the fullness of true garden roses that will seduce you with the gentle, delicate frills of their petals. The best of them have an intoxicating scent that you’ll want to bottle. And you’ll love the transformation from bud to open rose, such as the heavenly way the almost-green buds of Rosa ‘Margaret Merril’ unfurl into a white bowl-shaped rose with gold stamens.

Most rose buds, including the dark crimson ‘William Lobb’, are enveloped by a nubby green calyx before they open into flat saucershaped purple flowers. Alba roses, such as the pale pink ‘Queen of Denmark’, have a perfect scent and useful grey-green leaves. Centifolia roses have the fullest flowers, which start life cup-shaped, then seem forced open by the volume of their petals. ‘Fantin Latour’ is one such beauty.

David Austin is perhaps the most well-known rose breeder in England. In the 1970s, he started a whole new genre of English roses at his nursery in Shropshire by crossing old varieties with modern hybrid teas and floribunda roses. His mission was to breed modern roses that looked and smelled like oldfashioned cottage varieties but were healthier and repeat flowered through the summer. If I won the lottery, my house would be filled with his creations 24/7.