Choose roses with care
Viewing in summer and September is prudent, says Peter
OVER the years, the advice has regularly been given to choose new roses for your garden in early summer, when you can select colours, fragrances and cultivar vigour to suit your requirements. Looking at some recent plantings, these recommendations have to be reconsidered with the additional suggestion, having made a choice, that you return to see them again in September before making a purchase.
Roses planted in wellprepared soil, which has not grown roses before, are likely to give good service for at least 20 years, so you need to pick out cultivars carefully. My parents had roses bought from Woolworths (when they were a three old penny and sixpenny store) that flowered freely for all of their married lives. Roses in those days were budded onto wild dog rose (Rosa canina), which does live to a great age.
I have a bed of Rosa ‘Bonica’ planted in the early 1980s that are now reaching the stage of needing replacement. They are on Rosa laxa stock, which gives a large bush more quickly and is less likely to throw up suckers, but won’t thrive as long as R. canina.
Watching the establishment of
R. Home Florist and Precious Series over the past two years has prompted the advice to take a second look. Both are very disease-resistant, and additionally have the ability to repeat-flower time and time again, from early summer pretty well through to Christmas.
They have glossy, healthy, dark green leaves that are still in place through the autumn – in marked contrast to many other cultivars, which in late summer have been defoliated by the diseases black spot and rust. My large bush of
R. ‘Graham Thomas’, trained as a climber against the fence, is still flowering, but has needed repeated spraying (with Uncle Tom’s Rose Tonic) to protect from black spot defoliation.
“Roses planted in prepared soil can last 20 years”
3
All these roses need regular deadheading and pruning back to a good leaf to encourage more repeat-flowering stems. 4
Planting roses before Christmas will give you much stronger growth in their first summer. If you plant them where roses have grown before, then dig in masses of wellrotted manure to reduce the effects of replant disease.