Roses for every spot
Choose something new this summer. There are varieties to suit all gardens. Here’s our pick of the pack...
After a colour-packed spring, is your garden ready for a fragrant and flower-filled summer? When you need lots of colour, scent and charm, roses should be the first plants on your list.
Select varieties carefully and choose something new, which has been bred for easy care and resistance to disease, so that visions of bare sticks with a few black-spotted leaves will be a thing of the past! Garden centres are packed with potted roses to plant now that’ll brighten your garden this summer and for years to come.
Best for hedges
Hedging roses need to be dense, r robust and vigorous as they’ll probably not have the careful pruning and care their more select cousins in rose beds receive. The traditional choice is
Rosa rugosa and its variants such as ‘Scabrosa’ and ‘Blanche Double de Coubert’. These are free from disease and are very prickly so make an impenetrable barrier. Another species that makes a good hedge is Rosa
glauca, which has greyish purple leaves and one flush of small, but pretty, pink and white flowers in summer. If you want large, fragrant flowers, some David Austin English roses fit the bill, especially the thorny, pink ‘Harlow Carr’, yellow ‘Teasing Georgia’ and deep purple ‘Munstead Wood’. For a taller hedge, choose the favourite of many suburban gardens in the 1970s, the cluster-flowered rose ‘The Queen Elizabeth’.