Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
I’ve found myself in the middle of a series of posts about flowers that change colour as they open. Though I don’t have pictures to prove it, people who grow Rosa ‘Dream Come True’ say as the petals gradually redden, the yellow pales to creamy white. Continue reading “Rosa ‘Dream Come True’”
I’m aware that rose cultivars achieve something approaching immortality when small parts of the plant are passed from person to person down the generations, but it still seems amazing to think that Rosa ‘Queen Of Denmark’ has been around since 1816.
Its bicentenary came and went with less fanfare than that accorded a human queen, but the important thing is that people are quietly growing it around the world. You may know it as Rosa ‘Königin von Dänemark’. Continue reading “Rosa ‘Queen of Denmark’ | Pink Alba Rose”
A rambling rose will grow against almost any garden structure and can be encouraged to scramble into a tree. Most ramblers need to be tied to, or woven around, their support while the canes are still young and flexible.
If you only check one thing before buying a rambling rose, make it the height, which should be a good match for the structure it’s going to be growing against. A common mistake is to choose too big a rambler: you’ll have to keep cutting away potential flowering stems to prevent your rose from completely swamping the arch, arbour, obelisk or trellis. Here are some ways to support rambling roses that will show off these beautiful plants to their best: Continue reading “Beautiful Ways To Train And Support Rambling Roses”
An English Rose that pretty much has it all. The flowers are huge, fragrant, and very distinctive because of their deeply cupped flower form, although you can’t really appreciate the depth of the bloom from this angle. The colour is classic rose pink. It’s a shrubby type of rose, but fairly compact, with stems sturdy enough to bear the weight of the flowers. Continue reading “Rosa ‘Princess Alexandra Of Kent’”
My sweetheart uses the term ‘mannerly climber’ to describe a rose that will climb rather than swamp any structure provided for it by human carers: if the rose produces a succession of elegant, petal-packed rosettes, that’s so much more courteous of it. Rosa ‘Bathsheba’ is a fine example of a mannerly climbing rose.
Pictures rarely tell the full tale of any plant, particularly not a rose. We miss out on the fragrance (strong, flowery myrrh, since you ask) and find it hard to judge the size of the flowers. These are large ones, with a hint of a button eye that becomes Bathsheba very well.
Continue reading “Rosa ‘Bathsheba’, An English Climbing Rose”
I can’t tell you how many years I’ve wanted to visit Rosemoor when the roses are in bloom, but I can show you why. Friends had hinted I’d find a delightful rose garden there, but I’d been withholding judgement on whether it was a truly great one until I could see it for myself.
I’ve long been aware that not all rose gardens truly delight me. It seems I have a demanding wants list: relatively few rose gardens can tick off everything I look for. Continue reading “RHS Rosemoor Garden’s Rose Festival: Heaven on Earth”
Susan Rushton 