Get colour for months with Repeat-flowering roses
Shrub or climber, compact or lax – ensure optimum value and enjoyment with varieties that deliver more bloom for your buck. Graham Clarke reveals the top performers
THERE are roses… and then there are roses! A couple of centuries ago, when these summer charmers first became the must-have plants for any selfrespecting British garden, most roses were ‘once-flowering’, making an appearance solely in June/July, with a single flush of blooms that lasted for several weeks. The odd flower would sometimes pop up in late summer or autumn, but these were too sporadic to be considered a ‘second flush’.
These were the roses that dominated gardens until around 80 or so years ago, when the new, highly dramatic (but also single-flush) hybrid tea and floribunda bush types became incredibly popular.
More recently, however, a growing number of gardeners have started seeking out options with a longer season of bloom, and luckily there are shrub, climber and rambler roses that can deliver just that. Most nurseries call them simply ‘repeat-flowerers’, but occasionally you’ll see certain roses listed by their official descriptive terms: ‘recurrent’ and ‘remontant’. The distinction is quite subtle; while the former produce regular flowers over the summer, in a continuous process of bud formation, varieties of the latter offer successive bursts of blooms throughout the season.
Hit hybrids
Key to the development of many of them was the work of the late rose breeder David Austin. He combined the flower form and fragrance of existing recurrent and remontant types with newly bred varieties and, in 1961, introduced the world to the beautiful pink ‘Constance Spry’. Despite not quite having the repeatflowering merits enjoyed by many of his later roses, it was a hit with gardeners, its success proving the catalyst for further breeding. Nine years later almost 100 new forms were launched, and a new genre of plant was born. Known as the English Roses, they are all celebrated for their excellence in repeat-flowering.
You can justify planting repeatflowering roses in a bed of their own – the traditional way roses were grown in grand old gardens of yesteryear. However, these days most of us don’t have the space for that, so a more practical approach is to mix them in with shrubs and perennials, for that classic cottage garden look – lovely.
Here are some of the best repeatflowerers currently on the market.