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AT this time of the year, I am amazed by the way perennial weeds can sneak up on you. Suddenly a mature bramble will emerge from under a shrub, or bindweed will shimmy up my roses while my back is turned.

I don’t use many chemicals, but brambles need something strong, such as SBK Brushwood Killer, Roundup Ultra or Roundup Tree Stump Root Killer.

Perennial weeds are persistent because if you leave even the tiniest bit of root in the ground, they come back again.

It’s also particularly difficult to weed them out because, in winter and spring, borders are bare and perennial weeds are underground.

By early summer they’re just emerging, but are often covered by the foliage of other plants, so it can be July before you realise you’ve got a problem.

So I’ve put weeding at the top of the to-do list.

Spraying perennial weeds in a crowded border kills off your favourite plants as well.

It doesn’t matter how careful you are, there is always some drift.

But if you’re prepared to risk it, now is the time to do it.

Even if you’re happy to tolerate or enjoy weeds like loosestrife and toadflax, perennial weeds like ground elder and bindweed are taking up nutrients your flowers need.

There is a particularly persistent clump of ground elder under a row of Bonica shrub roses in my front garden.

These roses are far less abundant now than they were five years ago.

I think the ground elder is only partially to blame, as the roses are around 30 years old, and friends say that their Bonica is also flagging.

I am now weeding around them, covering the bare soil with cardboard then covering the cardboard with well-rotted manure.

The cardboard will break down and improve the soil, but will meanwhile deny the ground elder light.

Even so, the young shoots wriggle up round the edges of the cardboard, so I am having to weed them out every few days.

This treatment does mean that the roots are satisfyingly easy to chase out as they seem to come to the surface just beneath the cardboard.

As for the pretty Bonica roses, they have been an amazing feature in the front garden. We are known locally as “the house with the roses”.

A friend also has some twenty-five-year-old Bonica roses and says that his are on the way out.

The average life span of roses is around 35 years, but many live longer.

July and August are a good time to take cuttings of roses, so I could propagate new plants.

They would probably be ready to take over in a year or two if the current rose bushes finally give up.

But there is rose replant sickness, which is when roses fail to thrive where roses have been planted before.

There is a theory that rose replant sickness is because the soil is stripped of nutrients by the old roses.

The cardboard and manure currently covering the soil to suppress weeds should help that.

Anyway, when plants die of old age, they take their time, so I probably have a few years to think about it.

Although I love my Bonica roses, I think it might be time for something different by then. ■