Everything’s rosy

Varieties looking stunning include Super Trouper, You’re Beautiful, Aphrodite and Lady of Shalott, as well as English old rose hybrids such as Gertrude Jekyll and Darcey Bussell. While they used to be grown on their own in dedicated beds, they’re now grown in mixed borders with other shrubs and perennials. But given the huge variety of roses on sale, you have to be careful what to plant and where to achieve the best results. Compact roses with an upright habit are suitable for small gardens where beds are only 1m (40in) wide, so choose compact floribundas, patio roses and smaller English roses. For larger borders, you’ll get a great effect planting less vigorous varieties in threes, which will grow together to appear like one big shrub. Larger shrub roses are best planted singly further back in the border. Good plant partners include clematis, which can climb through the roses and enjoys the same conditions and similar feeds. In mixed borders, soften roses with airy specimens such as catmint or lavender or mix it up with lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis) and geraniums. If you want a longer season, it’s worth looking for repeat-flowering shrub roses. So, how do we keep our roses blooming? By midsummer, the first flush is usually coming to an end, so you’ll need to tidy up shrub and bush varieties by dead-heading and removing clusters of faded flowers. When the flowers of floribundas and hybrid tea roses have faded, remove the whole truss, cutting the stem just above the second or third leaf down. This will help conserve the plant’s energy to bear a regular succession of new flowering shoots. They’ll need to be fed with a dose of granular fertiliser and watered thoroughly if the ground is dry. Watch for signs of fungal disease, including black spot and mildew. They may need regular sprays with a fungicide to keep diseases at bay. Look out for colonies of aphids on the stems, which also have to be sprayed. Make sure the area is wellweeded and surrounding shrubs and perennials don’t swamp them – cut or tying back conflicting shoots and branches. If you dead-head them now, repeat-flowering roses should bloom again in late summer providing you fed them earlier on in the season. If you want cut roses for inside, don’t take more than a third of the flowering stem with the flower and cut just above an outward-facing bud, so that you don’t weaken the bush. Don’t cut flowers from newly-planted bushes in the first season. TLC will lead to repeatflowering blooms and a delicious fragrance for those balmy summer evenings.