Coming up roses
Roses around the around the island are starting to come into flower. A look at one of the world’s favourite plants
WHEN I was a student at Horticultural College I had to write two dissertations of my own choice. One had to be plant-orientated while the other could be anything connected with gardening. I chose to trace the history of the Hybrid Tea Rose ‘Peace’, as my floral work and for my general paper I researched and wrote about ‘Lady gardeners’. Little did I realise how these choices would have such a significant effect on my own gardening life.
There are not many notable women gardeners throughout history. Until we come to the end of the 1800s and early 1900s, gardening was strictly for the men. When women gardeners were first introduced into Kew Gardens, London, people used to scramble up to the top deck of the buses and trams in order to see over the walls and watch the ladies ‘who gardened in bloomers’. Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West were most unusual for their time in their planning and planting. Land girls and gardeners came to the fore during WWII, when they took the place of the men who had gone off to war but it took a long time before the ladies synonymous with gardening today like the late Rosemary Verey, (who was a friend and gardening guru of Prince Charles), Beth Chatto and Penelope Hobhouse became famous. Now glamour has come to the garden with Rachel de Thame, who was previously a model, and Kim Wilde, a pop star, and Charlie Dimmock, who is known more for her flaming red hair and other attributes, than her water features.
I like to think of myself as a good gardener. I created a wonderful three-acre garden out of a wilderness in Scotland, which contained three important plant collections as well as hundreds of other wonderful plants. It was shared with the public, raising thousands of pounds for charities in the process. My work as a garden plant conservationist brought me the ‘Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s medal’ for outstanding services to horticulture in Scotland and I am justifiably proud of that.
I THINK I inherited my love of roses from my mother, whose garden was a haven for old varieties. We used to smell ‘Lady Sylvia’s’ beautiful perfume as we brushed past it by the front door and my mother could strike old roses just by putting a cutting in the ground. I remember her delight when ‘Super Star’ with it’s very bright colouring came on the market and she was given a bush as a gift. What joy it brought her. Later on in my gardening life I became a judge at the International Rose Trials in Glasgow each August, where along with the Cockers, Harknesses, Austins and other famous names in the Rose world, I would mark selected roses for their beauty and health. My mother would have envied me.
Roses were known in Crete in about 1600BC and it is thought that the Greeks were the first to grow them in gardens. They associated them with the blood spilled by Adonis, beloved of Aphrodite. The oldest living rose, ‘The Hildesheim Rose’ is said to be between 300-500 years old. It is thought to be a relative of the dog rose, Rosa canina, and grows in the grounds of the Cathedral in Hildesheim, Germany.
Roses fall into several categories:
Species roses, including wild roses, which only produce one flush of flowers. Rosa banksiae is one in particular, brought to Europe from China and named after Banks, the great plant collector and is now widely available. My ‘Banksiae Rose’ is ‘Lutea’ which means gold, and its double flowers grow in tiny clusters scrambling along a fence line. The late Gertrude Jekyll described their colour as ‘rich butter’.
Old Garden Roses, among which is Rosa damascena, know in Cyprus as the Damask Rose. Growing abundantly in the Agros area, it is used in the manufacture of rose water and attar of roses, an oil used in perfumes. This rose has a most heavenly scent and is a gorgeous candy pink colour. It is thought to have originated in Damascus, hence it’s name and be a natural cross between Rosa gallica and Rosa moschata or Rosa phoenicia It can be prone to rust on the reverse of its leaves which can be caused by a cold spring after a dry summer and wet winter, or a shortage of potash, but you can pick off the affected leaves and destroy them or use a proprietary fungicide. Greenfly can also be a problem and if you don’t like using chemicals, spray with water into which some washing up liquid has been added. It might take several goes but the greenfly certainly don’t like being sprayed!
Modern Roses fall into several categories:- shrub, hybrid tea, patio, miniature, ground cover, rambling and climbing roses, each suitable for a specific purpose. The latter two are good for walls, fences, and pergolas and perhaps scrambling up through trees; ground cover speaks for itself, while the rest are used in beds and borders and are most often seen in Cypriot gardens.
You can group roses, grow them singly behind a wall or line a path with them but plant them so that you can enjoy the flowers and smell their perfumes. Some modern hybrids have little or no smell and others have had the thorns bred out of them. Referring once again to the Damascena Rose, it has a lot of thorns and a rather untidy habit, but you can forgive it all that for its heavenly perfume.
In Cyprus gardens you will find mostly Hybrid Tea Roses including lots of the old favourites such as ‘Peace’, ‘Grandmere Jenny’, ‘Chicago Peace’ and ‘Rose Gaugard’. ‘Queen Elizabeth’, which is really a hedging rose and can reach great heights, is also grown as a bush. This is a really good garden rose. If you are looking for a climber for walls and arches, which contrasts so well with the blue Cypriot skies, grow ‘Golden Showers’, well named for its showy yellow blooms. Another favourite climber is ‘Climbing Handel’ but there are so many and it has to be a personal choice. Many roses are known as ‘remontant’, which just means repeat flowerers and this is usually shown on the label.
Rose names in some cases reflect historic events but nowadays they are usually named for famous personalities or royalty and new varieties are launched each year at the Chelsea Flower Show (more about that next month).
The Royal National Rose Society has an extensive web site at www.rnrs.org and I can recommend Dr DG Hessayon’s book, The Rose Expert for splendid advice.
Hints for Healthy Roses
ROSES need a dormant period so that they can recover from their lengthy growing season. It’s not unusual to see roses blooming all winter long in Cyprus gardens. If this is allowed to happen year after year, then gradually the plant will weaken and eventually die. Better to cut the stems down to about 30cm in January and remove any leaves, making sure that the plant is secure in the ground against any winter winds. Give them a break of about 3-4 weeks and then start feeding again.
Containerised roses are available in nurseries almost all year long, while bare-root roses, usually in packets, are only around in the autumn or spring. Containerised roses can be planted in the garden at any time but try not to do so in the height of the summer. Dig a hole bigger and deeper than the container, and water the soil in the hole and roundabout. Put some compost at the bottom of the hole and add some slow release fertiliser. Making sure that the soil around the rose is also damp, gently ease it out of the pot or bag trying not to disturb the soil around the roots. Lower it into the hole, firm in the sides and top with some good garden soil and water well. Make sure you keep watering until the plant is well established.
Bare-root roses should only be planted in early spring or late autumn. If the plant has dried out in its bag, stand it in a bucket of water for several hours to recover and then trim the roots to around 30cm. Again, dig a hole about 25cm deep, bigger than the rose with its roots spread out. Water the hole adding a couple of handfuls of bone meal if you can get it. Hold the rose upright in the hole, spread out the roots and fill in around it with a mixture of peat, garden soil and some slow release fertiliser to just above the graft point. Firm in and water well. It is a good idea to trim the shoots down to about two or three outward facing buds to give it a good start.
Bug Watch
THERE are a lot of bugs around at the moment due to the prolonged hot weather. I have mentioned how to deal with greenfly either by chemical spray or water and washing up liquid. Watch out for them on pomegranates, almonds, apricots and peaches as well as roses and other flowers. There are still some red lily beetles about and the best way to deal with them is to squash them. Inside your rose blooms you might find some plump metallic-looking bugs, the same shape as lady birds, but a lot bigger. These are pollen beetles and generally do no harm once the flowers have opened as they just eat the pollen. However, they can bore through buds to get to the pollen. They are more likely to found in country gardens adjacent to fields of oil seed rape and are not really a menace. Spraying with a pesticide will just destroy any bees or other insects also enjoying the flowers and pollen.
