Having written a couple of days ago about our roses, they were the ones in the back garden. What I omitted was the wow display in the front.

Like the back, our front garden is allowed a certain degree of licence. Amongst the understorey there are some Apothecary’s Rose. Officially it is Rosa gallica officinalis. It’s a very old rose – Peter Beales says it dates to before 1200 – with large, semi-double, fuchsia-coloured flowers and a pure Old Rose scent; very free-flowering, creating a mass of colour. It mostly just grows as a mass of single stems, which creep and sucker their way around.

We were given a couple of off-shoots many, many years ago, and it is now rampant around the front garden. It is currently a mass of saucer-sized, shocking fuchsia-pink blooms. Sadly it has only a short season and will pretty much be over by the end of the month, but it is stunning for a few weeks.