Roses For Everyone

Everyone has known a rose, or even seen a rose. Perhaps your grandparents grew one, or your neighbours slack garden may have had a bedraggled one, or maybe just in your local park. Maybe once upon a time, you plucked soft, cool handfuls of petals to stuff into bottles to make perfume that sat and turned rank a week later, or kept a single rose from a lover until it crisped dustily to pieces.

Roses have weaved themselves into our lives in a way no other flower has done and they have our devotion in return and leave many other flowers weeping by the side-lines.

If you don’t currently have a rose in your life at the moment, it is a good time of year to change this. It is not, from a horticultural point of view, the best time for planting, that would be in autumn, or winter, when they have lots of time to develop their root system before any top growth is required, but it is the best time for gazing, sniffing and falling in love with them, which is of course the most important part. Once you have found the one you want, you can plant now, too, as long as you are prepared to keep it well watered all summer and give it a little feed to lift it. Just a handful of chicken pellets would be enough to lift the roses spirits. It is undoubtedly the time to wander gardens, garden centres and nurseries and stick your nose deep into a few roses to find out which one best evokes the perfumed hillsides of Iran, the perfect English country house summer garden, or your nana’s kitchen.

Generally, roses want sun and lots of it, the best and most plentiful displays will always come from roses that bask in full sun all day long. But there are varieties that will tolerate shade for some of the day, so seek these out if you are determined to fit a rose into a less than ideal spot. Pale roses are particularly good in darker corners, as they light them up. Try the almost thorn less ‘A Shropshire Lad’, which has beautiful cupped and ruffled flowers in pale pink, with a rich fruity fragrance. Flowers will last longer and can keep their scent better in shade, too. ‘Susan Williams-Ellis’ is a vigorous, early-flowering, pure white rose with a classic old rose fragrance and worth trying in a little shade.

If you don’t have soil into which roses can sink their roots, you can still have them in containers. Choose as large a pot as you can muster. Roses thrive best in deep, rich, moist but well-drained soil; recreate that richness with a compost and be prepared to keep them well watered and fed in summer. Poor, starved-looking plants with few flowers, will be the result if you neglect them.

Whether you have a short fence to clothe, or an ugly outbuilding to hide, there is a rose that will do the job fragrantly and prettily. Some climbers are particularly good at staying compact, great clouds.

Every rose we come across, we lift to our noses, breathe in deeply and sigh “Ah!”, whether or not it deserves it. In the past, breeders became caught up in developing roses for a particular shapely bloom and let scent fall by the wayside, so many of those used as cut flowers lack fragrance. Happily, breeders of garden roses now realise that scent is high on the list of must-haves; as long as you avoid the hybrid tea roses bred in the low-scent years, you shouldn’t find it too hard to track down a great-smelling rose.

©Rob Knowlittle, September 2019 @drjohngardening