Roses are the quintessential English, ‘cottage garden’ dream. Creating a successful rose garden is not as hard as you may think. The trick is to grow a rose suited to a specific area or need.
Climbing Roses
There’s nothing like the sight and scent of traditional English roses dripping from an archway or pergola, flowering month after month. Climbing roses boast strong flower power and their scent is to die for on a warm summers evening. Perfect for covering up unsightly walls or fences, they are the quintessential cottage garden climber. They can quite easily be trained to scramble up to 2m tall up structures and frames. The sheer variety of flower colour, shape and size gives you plenty of choices. Varieties such as ‘Compassion’ are vigorous, repeat flowerers that perform well whilst looking and smelling sweet and delicate.
Shrub Roses
Perfect for filling up gaps in beds and borders, or for spilling over the edges of large patio containers. Bush and shrub roses are totally winter-hardy and grow to a compact size of around 60-90cm making them easily manageable. Flowering from May to October each year, they are easy to grow and will provide a mass of flowers against bushy, glossy green foliage. The pure mass of flowers and dense foliage makes them good for us as small hedges or screening. As with lots of other roses, they can be cut to bring inside and create stunning displays in vases.
Standard Roses
These are a rather modern take on the traditional English rose. Standard Roses is a term used for a ball of flowers and foliage sat on top of a bare stem. This is the process of ‘top grafting’ the flowering variety onto the straight stem of the rootstock. Combining the beauty of an English rose with the contemporary look and feel of standard trees, they are perfect planted up in swanky pots. Placed them on either side of doorways, gateways and entrances, or line pathways to create a real grand entrance. Producing summer-long displays of highly fragrant blooms for decades to come, they are the perfect way to add height and elegance to your garden.
Groundcover Roses
Similar to bush or shrub roses, groundcover varieties stand out for their sheer mass of blousy blooms. However, this time spread out, rather than up, to cover the ground and create a carpet of colour. Our aptly named ‘Flower Carpet’ roses produce wave upon wave of flowers whilst remaining compact. Perfect for low borders or large patio containers where flowers will fall over the edges like a waterfall. Each rose will spread about 1m wide and 0.5m tall so are great value for money. Just one plant can cover plenty of bare ground. With their high disease resistance, winter hardy nature and delicate scent, groundcover roses are becoming ever more popular. It’s not surprising when they’re so easy to manage and maintain and yet give such fabulous results all year long!
So there you have it, a rose for all reasons, and that really is just to name a few.
For more information on how to plant and care for your roses, Click Here.
