Carol Klein on the variety and beauty of roses and her gardening week at Glebe Co age
These flowering shrubs are so versatile it’s no wonder they’re Britain’s favourite flower
When compiling lists of favourite shrubs, roses don’t necessarily feature, yet that’s exactly what most roses are – flowering shrubs. They can be used in so many different ways. And by the way, this is a great time to plant bare-root roses!
Once upon a time there were rose gardens consisting mainly of Hybrid Teas and, though the form and scent of many of them was and is superb, as shrubs they’re most unsatisfactory. Twiggy and bare branched, even the most vigorous and well-cultivated Hybrid Teas tended to look lonely, isolated from one another by expanses of naked soil – they’re one rose that dislikes company.
To my mind, their best use is as cut flowers, though some gardeners adore them. My grandad had a couple in a little bed in his front garden and he cosseted them on every possible occasion, including running down Holly Avenue in his slippers to win the race to scoop up the droppings from the milkman’s horse!
Shrub roses are another kettle of fish.
They vary widely in stature, in flower form and colour and they’re the group that’s undergone huge development during the last few decades to satisfy the requirements of modern gardeners. Modern shrub roses are bred to be strong and robust, healthy, less prone to blackspot and mildew and to repeat flower. Scent, too, is important – it’s so sad to hold a beautiful rose to your nose and find it has no perfume.
Most ‘Old Roses’ are shrub roses, too, and though the great majority of them have exquisite perfume, few of them flower for more than a month at most. We grow one of the oldest of these ‘Old Roses', Rosa gallica ‘Versicolor’ (Rosa mundi), a damask rose whose petals are randomly striped with deep pink and white. We grow it in Alice’s garden. Her second name is Rosamund and she loves this rose; it usually flowers for her birthday in mid-June. In common with all the shrub roses at Glebe Cottage, it grows among perennials and grasses.
As Graham Stuart Thomas, the famous rosarian, pointed out, in nature roses don’t grow in isolation and he put this observation into gardening practice at Mottisfont Abbey where, together with head gardener David Stone, the awe-inspiring collection of ‘Old Roses’ was created. Because many of these varieties were almost extinct, they were the only source for propagation of new