NEW TRICKS TO KEEP IT COM
they combine well with many bedfellows. Roses also withstand pretty much any pruning regime and tolerate a wide range of soils. Consequently, many of us test them to the limits. I was working on a planting scheme with a client last week and she was almost in despair at the rose catalogues, all brimming with eye candy – the choice is indeed baffling. However, many countries have schemes that trial roses, judging them for performance including disease resistance, vigour and the like. In Britain the two main schemes are the RHS Award of Garden Merit and the British Association of Rose Breeders (BARB) Gold Standard roses. The latter is less well known. It was started in 2004-05 and looks at roses sent in by breeders. The oldest winner is probably Penny Lane, which was bred in 1998. One of the most recent is Virginia McKenna, bred in 2011, a 1m high shrub rose with buttercup yellow flowers reminiscent of a hybrid musk. Ian Kennedy is the manager of BARB and he explained the trials to me. They are based on four factors: disease resistance, floriferousness, fragrance and the form of the plant. The trials last for just two years. All the plants are given two to three foliar feeds of Uncle Tom’s Rose Tonic annually plus a winter wash of Bordeaux mixture. The roses judged good enough to receive the Gold Standard accolade can be seen on its website (rosesuk.com). Princess Anne, one of my favourite shrub roses, is there. It has a good bushy form, rich purple-pink flowers and excellent repeating qualities. One thing that concerns me about the trials is that many experts say it takes a good two to three years for a rose to establish and show off its best form, so it seems a little unfair to judge them so early. The Award of Garden Merit from the RHS is generally a good indicator of a gardenworthy plant. Its current list has more than 300 roses, although it does include Iceberg and other notoriously disease-prone varieties. If you have a leaf left on an Iceberg now, you are doing well, but it is a much-loved rose even so. Maybe we are too critical of disease. The well-known Knock Out series of groundcover roses, bred in the United States, are very disease-resistant and flourish everywhere, but many ask,