Carol Klein picks the best plants to pair up with ravishing roses
Our favourite flowers benefit from some plant companions – and the resulting look is fabulous!
Our most popular flower – the rose, has had so many words written about it, from Shakespeare yes, but long before that, too. The Ancient Romans were enamoured of roses and it’s thought that some of the first hybrid roses were an accidental result of cross-pollination in beds of roses where Ancient Roman gardeners had planted out different natural variants they had collected. Pliny The Elder writes of double roses. It seems they undertook some deliberate hybridisation, too.
Historically roses are among the most hybridised and intensively bred flowers in our gardens.
Fashions change – throughout much of the 20th century and certainly in the 1950s, the roses most in favour were the hybrid teas, while nowadays modern shrub roses are favoured. It’s not only the kind of roses we esteem that changes, but the way in which we grow them that alters, too.
Nowadays we’re no longer content to have hybrid teas isolated in a bed with nothing but bare soil between them – when we’re growing our roses we prefer to surround them with other plants, and so we should. This is the way in which they want to grow. In nature, their antecedents – wild roses – don’t grow in a wasteland surrounded by sterile soil. They grow among perennial plants and grasses and in our gardens, they grow better and are much happier in mixed company.
In the exemplary rose garden at Mottisfont Abbey, in Hampshire, that idea is at the heart of the planting. When Graham Stuart Thomas, the famous rosarian, gathered together all the old roses he could find, in some cases searching for years for some which had almost disappeared, he and the head gardener and designer of the garden, David Stone, planted it on the principle that roses should grow with other plants.
The great majority of them are shrubs and most of us gardeners wouldn’t dream of planting our flowering shrubs in isolation.
So which plants should we choose to keep our roses company? In most cases our roses will be growing in sun and hopefully the soil where they’re growing has been adequately fed with organic matter and is reasonably fertile. For our new programme, we planted two bare-root roses, both ‘Rosamundi’, in our youngest daughter Alice’s garden. We also pruned a well-established bush of the same rose in her garden. It has thrived there for years among several different plants. One of the leading lights is Sanguisorba menziesii, another member of the rose family with glaucous-roselike leaves and pink, fluffy tail-like flowers. It can be over exuberant but does brilliantly well. Close by, other relations – astilbes – are equally happy. Their foliage rises early with the unfolding shoots of hosta ‘Frances Williams’. Later there will be pink and crimson flowers. The colour theme here is crimson, pink and white. There are bushy plants of Knautia macedonica that produce their crimson pincushion flowers for months. We never deadhead this plant as its spherical seed heads are just as attractive as its flowers. Another plant with pincushion flowers, astrantia, is planted in abundance here, both the pinkflowered, sterile hybrid ‘Roma’ and our own seedlings, whose flowers range from greeny white to deep, rich crimson. Later there will be my mum’s white phlox alongside Selinum wallichianum.
In a different scheme in Annie’s garden (our eldest daughter), ‘William Lobb’, a moss rose with magenta flowers, runs through the border. Here, plants of a more purple persuasion grow around the roses, astilbe ‘Superba’ and the diminutive astilbe ‘Willie Buchanan’ grow with Viola cornuta, purple phlox, later asters and the tall veronicastrum ‘Fascination’.
Choosing friends for your roses is an enormous pleasure. The roses won’t mind what you choose as long as they have company!
‘When we are growing our roses we prefer to surround them with other plants’