Roses

The rose has become synominous with the English and England ever since William Shakespeare first described the squabbling war for succession between two families, the white rose York and the red rose of Lancaster as the War of the Roses.

The rose was never a plant that was unique our small island, but we are more than happy to adopt it. Wild natural roses are actually found in a wide variety of habitats in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Roses can be evergreen or deciduous, perennial shrubs, climbers and briar roses. There are old garden roses, modern roses and large-flowered hybrid tea roses.

Roses occupy such a wide diversity that it is actually quite difficult to describe them. Roses can be thornless like Rosa Zephirine Drouhin or they can vie with vicious looking medieval maces like Rosa 'Mermaid'. They can be either scandent, erect, trailing or scrambling. Some have 5 leaves while others have seven, suckering stems can have even more. But without question a rose is grown for its flower.

A rose flower can be single or borne in clusters of up to 40 or more flowers. They can appear in summer or autumn, be intensely fragrant or disappoint with no scent at all. The rose flower itself can take a wide variety of form, there can be flat, cupped, rounded, quartered rosettes or pompon. There are singles and doubles, urn-shaped and high-centered rose flowers.

Part of the great attraction of the rose is its suitability for all but the tropical garden. It takes enormous energy to produce such an abundance of colour and scent so roses like a cool winter where they can rest. Roses grow quickly. They can be trained as standards, as a specimen shrub on their own as part of a floriferous border, roses can scramble over other plants or garden features or climb over the house walls. The rose has so much to offer the gardener.

Whatever rose you choose it will be a hungry plant. Roses prefer open locations, they don't like shaded locations, they like lots of moisture and full sun. While some plants will only thrive in the purest fresh air, it is a well known fact that many of the best roses were often grown in a highly industrial area of England knows as the 'Black Country', so-named because of the thousands of Victorian chimneys that once belched thick smoke turning every surface black.

Pruned roses can better use their energy for making blooms. Prune any rose by removing the unwanted stem just above a bud, but choose your bud carefully. So that the bud is NOT pointing inwards otherwise it will produce a stem that grows inwards and chokes the available light from the centre of the plant.