Coming Up roses
Not just for Valentine’s, now is a good time to plant the flowers of love
St Valentine’s Day tomorrow is a good reminder that we can still plant bare root roses as we are currently in the dormant season.
Roses like other deciduous shrubs can be planted bare root from November to March while they are still asleep. You don’t do this if the ground is frozen or waterlogged, but temperatures have been clement recently so now would be an excellent time to get planting.
Buying bare root has a number of advantages – it’s far cheaper than getting roses in pots and there’s a much greater range to choose from. With less plastic, soil and transport costs, it also becomes a more environmentally friendly way to garden.
Average sized gardens and smaller plots require plants that will earn their bit of space. Roses sing for their supper by delivering some of the most beautiful blossoms and
delicious scents. But it also makes sense to choose repeat flowering roses as they will deliver twice the value.
The first flush will come around June and then the second at the end of the summer or beginning of autumn.
The second flush is not always as prolific as the first but you can help them along by regular deadheading and keeping your roses well fed and watered during the summer.
Many of the most beautiful roses are repeat flowering, for example ‘Darcey Bussell’ named after the esteemed ballerina. It is a gorgeous shrub rose with rich crimson-pink petals and fruity scent.
My old favourite ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ also performs twice very reliably. She has intensely rich pink flowers with an equally strong fragrance – the distilled essence of an old rose scent. This variety can be grown as a shrub or small climber.
A good medium-sized climber is ‘New Dawn’ with lovely silvery soft pink flowers which are sweetly scented and occur in clusters.
Have you always fancied a rose growing around your front door? How about ‘Bathsheba’ which is a repeat flowering climber – the scented flowers are a sumptuous blend of apricot-pink and soft yellow.
Gone are the days when we only planted a single lollipop shaped standard rose in the middle of the front garden. Roses are now recognised for their great versatility whether they are climbing walls, scrambling over and disguising eyesores, adorning elegant pots or even used as ground cover.
Ground cover roses tend to spread widely, have masses of flowers throughout the season and as such are very useful for steep banks and other tricky spots.
The Flower Carpet roses are disease resistant and very low maintenance. They come in white, red, yellow or pink and once established are drought tolerant. They repeat flower pretty much continuously through the summer and into autumn. Forming compact bushes, they don’t even require pruning but you can chop them back in spring.
Rambling roses often just bloom once but there are exceptions such as ‘Super Fairy’. These medium pink flowers are borne in big clusters throughout the summer and with their lax growth can be trained well over pergolas, arches, pillars and obelisks.
Choose repeat flowering roses and get twice the value