Gardening 213
Every address every month
In Your Garden
Monthly gardening ideas & tasks by Andrew Staib of Glorious Gardens
Creating a rose garden Rose gardens have been around for thousands of years, with mention of them in the gardens of Babylon and illustrations of rose gardens found in 14th Century BC pyramids. The main rose we use today is Rosa chinensis which was cultivated in China for display and for medicinal purposes for millennia. It wasn’t until the 18th Century that the Chinese rose cultivars came to Europe. By 1840, thousands of cultivars were available for sale. Today there are tens of thousands of cultivates from over 300 rose species.
Rosa chinensis
This your chance to add to this fragrant tradition and make your own rose garden! Over the last few years Glorious Gardens have been asked more frequently to create traditional rose gardens, as people are no longer worried about their old-fashioned reputation. Especially with new rose cultivars, interesting underplanting and contemporary plant combinations, a rose garden can be a very fresh addition to your garden. Space and soil The first thing you need is a good area to grow them. They don’t like too much wind, so a sheltered space is preferable, with moist soil. They love clay because of all the minerals in this type of soil and don’t mind having their feet wet in Winter as long as there’s not weeks of water logging. If you have more sandy or chalky soil, prepare the beds with a 50% mix of compost and manure and dig this into the ground. Go for at least 30cm of the good stuff. They can’t get enough richness. Your roses will need at least 6 hours of direct sunlight to thrive. If your rose garden will be considerable in size, you can prepare your holes individually and mix
the compost and manure with the pre-existing soil and then plant separate roses in their own space. Preparation is everything so if you are beginning from scratch, now is the time to put lots of effort into good soil composition. They like 6.5 PH which is slightly acidic, but they happily grow in the alkaline soils of Brighton where I live. Rose selection Think about what type of roses you want: what colour, what shaped flower, what height. Also think about the style of rose: Hybrid Teas, Grandiflora and Floribundas, Miniatures, Standards or climbing and rambling roses. There are so many roses out there I can’t possibly go into them now but if it is big project you might like to run it past me or another garden designer first. Colour combination is really important as colours that jar can ruin your whole display. Buying and planting your roses If you wait until November, you can buy bare root roses which have been lifted from fields and tend to have a greater root spread. Also, it is an ideal time to plant as hot whether won’t dry the new plants out.
