I walked round the garden this afternoon and it is absolutely awash with roses. I’ve never seen such a profuse display.
Our Lady Hillingdon, once it took off 20 years ago, is always prolific and provides flush after flush of apricot coloured roses from May until Christmas &ndash’ There are usually a couple of blooms out in Christmas Day.
The Buff Beauty did nothing for many years until we moved it under the birch tree, since when it’s gone berserk. It’s now 3-4 metres up the tree and hanging over providing swags of pale creamy yellow flowers.
There are dog rose suckers growing from the Buff Beauty too. They’re smothered in flowers – small, single pale pink roses – right to the top of the birch tree (higher than the house) and as much sideways. There are great weeping branches of it over our neighbour’s garden!
The old roses down near the pond are also going well rambling up the trees. One is the pink Anne Boleyn; another slow starter.
And the two climbers rambling up the supports where the apple tree was taken out are also doing well after a couple of poor years. Lots of pink-blushed white roses. One is Albrighton Rambler (see Unblogged May); although this is a newly developed rose it is of the old Bourbon style but sadly not very scented.
There’s a standard rose down by the pond which is a hoot. For a standard it is vigorous with branches extending a good 2-3m (because we let it when it went native, rather than bother trying to prune it). It is clearly grafted at standard height (so about 1.5m) but the graft has thrown off at least two different colours of tightly double roses – some a dark purply-pink, others almost white. Heaven knows what’s been done to it, but it’s very “Alice in Wonderland”.
There are a few other roses yet to come. The small Maiden’s Blush is now out and it’s being nurtured from being neglected in a pot for some years; if the other roses are anything to go by it’ll take off in a couple of years. And there’s a pink rose also down under the birch tree which is usually also prolific. That was sold as a patio rose (so miniature) but is another that has grown naturally into a 1.5m round bush. Once it starts it usually just flowers non-stop through to the autumn – although it had an off year last year, maybe as it got cut back too hard away from the path.
If you walk down past the birch tree to the pond, especially on a nice sunny day like today, the garden is just a heady haze of rose scent, and a visual haze of roses. I have never seen them so abundant.
Moral. If you want great displays of roses, leave them alone. Don’t prune them into silly little bushes, but let them climb and ramble – after all that’s what roses do naturally.
Today is the first Sunday in Advent, so it’s that time when I, like many others, would normally be running an Advent Calendar of blog posts. And then for a few days either side of New Year have a series of posts summarising the year past and looking forward to the year to come.