Talking unfussy roses
A really good year for the roses!
The early carrots washed away, my salvias drowned, while tulips were like pound shop umbrellas in a gale, inside out as soon as they opened. Proof, if it was needed, that the weather is now officially bonkers. But there is a silver lining… it’s been a really good year for the roses.
I love roses, always have, and even though the soil in my garden doesn’t particularly like them, I’ve built up a collection of good ‘doers’.
As anyone who has tried and failed to get a good display knows, roses can be fussy, especially if you choose a variety that requires ideal conditions of full sun and compost-lavished clay soil.
My sloping garden has the sun but the ground is thin and gravelly and although I’ve steadily built it up with compost, I have to choose roses that are unfussy and easy to please. Top of the list, and opening months earlier than it should in April, (have I mentioned the weather?) is a variety named after the oldest rose garden in the world, La Roseraie de l’Haÿ (Roseraie du Val-de-Marne) just south of Paris.
The best morning scent
Almost 2m (6ft) tall and shrubby, this fine specimen, ‘La Roseraie de l‘Hay’ is part of the rugged Rosa rugosa clan that instead of thorns have bristly briars topped with pea green, crinkled foliage (‘rugosa’ means wrinkled in Latinas if you didn’t know!) and it’s tough and disease free, I think of it as the go-to rose for people who can’t grow roses. The flowers are shaped like purple rosettes and flush right through summer, each with a heavy perfume that’s a cross between sweet Turkish Delight and cloves. The fragrance is best in the morning, before the heat of the day has had a chance to evaporate the ‘attar’, or scented oil that collects in the petals. The morning concentration combined with the fact that our noses are more sensitive in dewy air (moisture is essential for our olfactory organs to work at full capacity) makes ‘La Roseraie de l‘Hay’ a gift for early risers like me.
Next door I’ve a Rosa ‘Ballerina’, which is the rose for people who don’t like the look of roses, as the profusion of small, white and pink-edged flowers makes it look like a hydrangea. It’s a type of rose known as a ‘hybrid musk’ – a group bred in Romford in the early 1920s, by one Reverend Joseph Pemberton. I don’t want to get into the thorny thicket of rose history here, but if you have anything less than that ideal clay soil, this is a group to look out for.
I grow mine as shrubs and apart from deadheading and sni
