I need advice on a rose for my new arch
Bill Allan, by email
Your new arch replaces a dead cherry tree and you’d like a rose that’s fragrant and disease-free. The site is in a sheltered south-east spot, west of Edinburgh. There are literally hundreds of climbing roses, so what follows are four of my personal favourites in different colours, all fragrant, none of them over-vigorous and all roses I grow or have grown.
For a white, I suggest an old variety that grows along the front wall of our garden and always attracts interest. It’s a climbing tea rose (not a Hybrid Tea), called ‘Sombreuil’, although it’s sometimes known as ‘Colonial White’. Bred in France in 1850, it has stood the test of time. The fragrance is intense and wonderful.
For a pink/peach-coloured rose, I suggest ‘A Shropshire Lad’, a David Austin rose dating from 1966. It’s of moderate vigour, moderate disease resistance (it will need spraying though) and authentic tea rose fragrance, reliably repeat flowering and with large, heavy blooms. I’ve grown two plants of it for many years and they always give enormous pleasure.
My first choice of a red climber – strictly more a rambler – would be another old, but still very popular variety, called ‘Paul’s Scarlet’, an English rose bred in the early years of the 20th century. The flowers are individually small but are borne in intensely coloured clusters.
The pink climber is one I have growing over an archway where it never fails to delight. It’s also an old British rose, a Bourbon climber, with the distinctly unromantic name of ‘Blairii Number Two’. The name comes from its breeder, a Mr Blair, who raised it in 1845. He gardened in London but his name suggests he may have been Scottish, making this an appropriate variety for a
Scottish garden. Some descriptions state it has a slight tendency to attract mildew late in the season, but I’ve never found this to be the case.