Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
Companion plants will bring out the best characteristics of roses – especially shrub roses – and help to make up for any weaknesses. While they’ll mingle around, above or below the roses, they should not compete too aggressively for food, water or space. Continue reading “Great Companion Plants for a Cottage Garden: Roses”
I took this colourful picture a few years ago during an event at the Antique Rose Emporium in Texas. The creamy-white flower is a form of hibiscus. Continue reading “Retro Floral With Peonies and Roses”
“There is something quite special about white roses… they are all purity and light.” – David Austin
I’m sharing pictures of white shrub roses and rambling roses in eager anticipation of the peak flowering season for roses which is a couple of weeks or so away in my part of the world. As my sweetheart would say, bring it on! Meanwhile, I’ll let the roses do their own talking.
If you’re looking for a purple rambling rose, there aren’t many to choose from. Rosa ‘Veilchenblau’ has its passionate fans and detractors, as do many roses. It only flowers once and is not resistant to blackspot: this plant has a freckling of it on the leaves. The spent flowers don’t drop cleanly, so the plant becomes scruffier towards the end of flowering. But what a rare beauty it is at its zenith, throwing out arching canes of flowers that become more purple with age. Continue reading “Purple Flowers and Foliage”
There’s something about roses with many petals. For many, these romantic, soulful plants are the archetypal roses, especially if they happen to be pink and to have a good fragrance.
Some of these do and some don’t. What interests me about them is their flower forms, the patterns the petals take, and the way the blooms cluster together. The odd one you may recognise. Continue reading “Old-fashioned Pink Roses With Lots of Petals”
A free-to-visit garden is not to be sniffed at – but then again, some of them are. Few visitors to a rose garden can resist leaning in to inhale the fragrance. We seem hard-wired to think ‘scent’ the moment after we think ‘rose’.
Shakespeare’s ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ can’t take all the credit. Scent associations trap memories like flies in amber in a lifetime’s layering of impressions. Continue reading “Antique Rose Emporium in Brenham, Texas, and Memories of Roses”
