Gardening David Wheeler
I started sniffing roses in mid-march this year, in Morocco, where, despite a late start to the season, many were already breaking bud. By the end of the month, they were flowering everywhere, nowhere more prolifically than at the Beldi Country Club on the outskirts of Marrakesh, where visitors are met with two wide beds – fields almost – containing some 15,000 individual bushes. Club owner Jean Dominique Leymarie is proud of his collection, consisting of many – no longer bearing their varietal names – ‘rescued’ from old Moroccan gardens when he began his collection less than two decades ago. Nearby, at Anima, Austrian cult-figure André Heller’s garden, the gardeners cut fresh rose blooms every day to float on the still water of a shaded font. A few thousand feet higher, in the grounds of Domaine de la Roserie in the foothills of the High Atlas Mountains, the roses were merely full of promise – I should come back in a fortnight, I was told.
But two weeks later, I was on Mallorca, intoxicated by the fragrance of countless, freshly opened roses in such gardens as Son Muda and C’an Estel. The first of these two places favours only white or near-white kinds: ‘Sally Holmes’, ‘Cooper’s Burmese’, ‘Alberic Barbier’ and myriad, closely planted rugosas. They scramble waywardly over walls or rusty iron frameworks or have been marshalled by the hundred into regulated rows and concentric circles. At C’an Estel, there’s a preference for David Austin’s English roses, parvenus that seemingly excel themselves in warm gardens far from Mr A’s breeding grounds in the West Midlands.
Near the north coast of Madeira, the island’s president displays a personal collection of roses in beds devoted to individual breeders: Kordes, Guillot, Barni – and indeed our own David Austin, resulting in a spread of colour and perfume between the mountains and the Atlantic depths.
At home on the Welsh border, our double-flowered yellow banksia – now forever entwined with a rampant wisteria – gave of itself prolifically this year, relishing a frost-free spring and a succession of sunny days on the run-up to and beyond Easter.
At this time of the year, however, I head to Hampshire, to Mottisfont Abbey and its two adjoining walled gardens, where the late Graham Stuart Thomas built an unrivalled collection of roses. The National Trust looks after it superbly with horticultural skills, succeeding in overcoming the tricky question of how to prevent the soil around roses looking empty and forlorn. Early in the season, the bushes are spiked with white foxgloves, giving way, as summer advances, to thick mats of sweet-smelling pinks. They add fabulously to a nasal cocktail of rarefied scents, while at the same time smothering weeds and helping to preserve moisture.
I have made my own small collections of roses down the years, beginning as a young teenager with as many gaudy hybrid teas as meagre amounts of pocket money allowed. Later, I settled for old roses bearing the names of longforgotten French aristocrats. More recently, my penchant has been for wild roses, many of them single-flowered and non-repeating. Nonetheless, they thrive in semi-woodland conditions, where they associated themselves with natural grace among the likes of Japanese maples and my ever-expanding collection of hydrangeas.
The time has now come to revisit some of those earlier interests. I have more space for informal swathes of roses, allowing me to plant in drifts of three, five or even seven, of a kind that can be herded together for a massed effect. Watch out for me in specialist rose nurseries during September and October.