COMPLEMENTING ROSES…
Hide the 'knobbly knees' of your roses with luxurious companions. Val Bourne
Many years ago, when I was a small child rollerskating through my local park in London, the rose gardens consisted of roses and nothing else. They were mainly repeat-flowering hybrid teas and they were magnificent in June and then they rationed out their flowers until late autumn in flushes. The thorny stems were clearly visible to all, especially to a rollerskating child. By latesummer the leaves had often begun to fall due to blackspot, making the thorny legs even more prominent. When I went to Japan to lecture on roses, I used a picture of the Best Beloved’s knobbly knees to illustrate the point that roses are lovely above the knees but often less so beneath. Please don’t tell him. Thankfully the world of rose growing has moved on since my childhood and most of us grow our roses among other
flowers and our gardens look far better for it. You can have a warm up act in April and May and I am very fond of Tulipa ‘Ballerina’ because this fragrant, terracotta lily-flowered tulip flatters the new coppertinted rose foliage. It’s fragrant and it is fairly perennial. Add ‘Negrita’, a strong doge-purple and the pale mauve ‘Shirley’ and you’ll have colour for two or three weeks. The perennial wallflowers, such as Erysimum ‘Bowles’s Mauve’ and ‘Apricot Twist’, can also begin in April followed by forms of Viola cornuta, such as ‘Belmont Blue’. These are truly perennial violas with winged flowers and they have a habit of twining up through the roses. You can also fill the gaps in summer, when the roses might be on a sabbatical, and you can also extend the season into late-autumn. Given that many roses will carry on until November, because the
onset of winter is later these days. I am always grateful for cosmos, an annual I raise every year, and for penstemons. By using a mixture of plants it’s possible for a border that relies on roses to be interesting between April and lateOctober. My Summer Border My own summer borders at Spring Cottage rely on healthy floribunda roses, because they are prolific flowerers and less upright than hybrid teas. The ones I use never need spraying, because as many of you may know I have been an organic gardener all my life. The key rose I use, bred by the eco-friendly German rose breeders Kordes, is ‘Champagne Moment' (Korvanaber). This was the Rose of the Year 2006 and it reaches up four feet during its first flush, but gets taller by the
