Roses – a lifelong passion
Monty shares his favourite roses, with tips on planting and nurturing them
my “...their names ran off tongue like a floral charm, conjuring a velvety richness and fulsome sensuality”
I savoured and tried each flower... like a wine buff tasting a new vintage
It took me a while to love roses as a plant. I had always loved the flowers in the kind of kneejerk way that most of us love sunsets or the song of a blackbird, but I had no feeling for them as plants and grew them almost because I felt that was what was required of anyone planting a ‘proper’ garden. Then I moved to Herefordshire and made my first big garden (as recounted in my long-out-of-print book, The Prickotty Bush). I bought my mother-in-law a couple of roses for her birthday and became seduced by the names of the roses in the catalogue of a local nursery. They were all ‘old’ or ‘classic’ roses – gal l icas, albas, damasks, mosses, centifolias, bourbons – not fashionable back then in the 1980s, and their names ran off my tongue like a floral charm, conjuring a velvety richness and fulsome sensual ity that the floribundas and hybrid teas of my youth had never even hinted at. I was hooked. So I visited the nursery – Acton Beauchamp Roses – and ordered about 50 different ones, three of each, at an absurdly cheap wholesale price of about a pound or so a rose. That summer the little stubby plants produced their first flowers and I savoured and tried each one, as a wine buff tasting a new vintage. I was no rose buff, but a lifelong passion had begun. I devoured Peter Beales’ wonderful book Classic Roses – still the best on the subject – and he became my wise rose guru and, until his untimely death, my guiding rose spirit. When we moved to Longmeadow, I dug up a few dozen of these roses and took them with me. Then I became severely depressed and did very little for a year or so. They were dark days. But my wife would pick small bunches of roses from the pots I’d not yet planted out and place them in vases before me: ‘ Tuscany’, ‘Charles de Mills’, ‘Alba Semiplena’, ‘ Celest ial’, ‘ Chapeau de Napoléon’, ‘ Rose de Rêscht’ – those exquisite f lowers lightened my deep darkness. In time, I planted them all out at Longmeadow and some remain a quarter of century later, still flowering. Since then, I’ve acquired perhaps a couple of hundred different roses ( I’ve never counted) and I love them all. They begin with the yellow species roses in the Spring Garden – R. hugoni s , R. ‘ Cantabr igiensis’ and R. primula. Each has their own character but all share the same characteristic display based upon single, pale yellow f lowers. In fact these are getting a little elderly and I think I shall plant new ones this month to grow along side and eventually replace them. Three years ago I added 32 of my favourite roses to the Cottage Garden, one in each corner of the eight square beds – and they hit their straps for the first time last
summer, a glorious, soft amalgamation of every shade of pink. You must keep faith with these shrub roses for a year or two. They should all be pruned hard on planting, which takes a bit of nerve, and for the first year or two the new growth will be too small and too sappy to satisfactorily carry the flowers, which of course like apples on a very young tree, are all full size from year one. But by year three there is sufficient permanent structure to hold the flowers high and proud. I also have a couple of beds of yellowapricot roses: ‘Agnes’, ‘The Pilgrim’, ‘Crown Princess Margareta’ and ‘Charles Darwin’. All are David Austin ‘English’ roses that flower profusely, whereas most of the older roses flower once for about a month, with an occasional second flurry later in summer.
Where the wild things are
I love the simplicity and purity of species roses and have a couple of dozen different ones now in various parts of the garden, but especially in the new Orchard Beds, where I want them to relate to the simplicity of the apple blossom. Some are very well known and straightforward, others slightly arcane, but all are entirely themselves, untouched by the guile of the breeder. The hand of man has never improved them. If they tangle and twist then that is what they do. If they only f lower for a few days than that is unchangeable. This imbues them with a freshness and wildness that I love. One of their great attractions for the gardener nervous about roses and the various problems they may have – from blackspot, to powdery mildew or rust – is that species roses are amongst the toughest plants in the garden and will grow in almost any soil and any position. They hardly ever suffer from any of the afflictions that their more highly bred cousins suffer. I have had a pair of R. moyesii shrubs (to be honest, two groups of three, planted
together) at the back of the Grass Borders that I planted back in 1997. I replace the old growth every few years by pruning the woodiest stems down to the ground, but they show no signs of diminishing their performance. Their glorious spangle of f lowers spreads evenly across the large shrubs, like a blood-red stellar display. They then go on to have a second performance as the flowers convert into dramatic bottleshaped orange hips, hanging like artfully placed decorations. As well as R. moyesii, many of the species f lowers turn into lovely, curvy hips. R. rugosa are like tomatoes, those of R. pimpinellifolia are a deep brown and the fruits of R. glauca are bunched like grapes. If you want to make the most of these hips then you should not prune until late winter – and then only to remove dead or damaged wood or to restrict the size. If, however, you want to make the most of their f lowers, the time to prune is immediately after flowering. But don’t get in a state about it. Just cut out the dead wood, take off any crossing or damaged stems, or those that are becoming very old – taking them right back to ground level – and let the shrub get on with what it will do perfectly
They can only get better and will see me out, even if I live to 100
wel l without any help from even the most skilful of gardeners. I have planted climbing and rambling roses up most of the apple trees – including those in the Writing Garden and, like the roses in the Cottage Garden, last year was the first year that they really started to perform. They can only get better and will see me out, even if I live to 100 – which I fully intend to do, gardening to the end! There are two types of climbing roses: cl imbers and ramblers. The major di f ference between the two is how and when they f lower. Climbers – like hybrid tea and most shrub roses – form their f lowers on new wood that grows in spring, before flowering, whereas ramblers – like most species roses – do so on the growth that happened in the previous spring and summer. Ramblers such as ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’, ‘Wedding Day’ or ‘Rambling Rector’ make one gorgeous, frothy display of small flowers that are produced in clusters which only flower for four to six weeks during the summer. However, climbers, such as ‘ Madame Al fred Carrière’, ‘ Zéphirin Drouhin’ or ‘Souvenir du Docteur Jamain’, tend to have larger, individual flowers that will last for longer, and many repeat flower throughout much of summer. In general, climbers are much easier to train against a fence or wall, whereas most ramblers are happiest when they are left to scramble freely up a tree. Turn the page for more on roses