Our Greatest Roses

We all love a rose and there is one for most situations, whether it’s in a pot, glasshouse, shrub border or hedge or clambering into a tree. These are the roses you can depend on for both beauty and fragrance, wherever you want to grow them, advises Charles Quest-Ritson, author of the RHS Encyclopedia of Roses

- Charles Quest-Ritson

ROSES are among the easiest of plants to grow and perhaps the most rewarding. No other shrub is so elegant, scented, continuously in flower and available in every colour bar true blue. Choose well, bearing in mind the seasons, and you’ll find they’re in flower for at least six months of the year.

First into bloom are the Himalayan species Rosa sericea, R. foetida from central Asia, our own native Scotch rose R. spinosissima and first-generation hybrids such as Harison’s Yellow. None of them blooms more than once, so the best early flowering garden roses are cultivars with one of these species in its ancestry— a welcome promise of what’s to follow.

In warmer climates than ours, roses flower all year round and they’ll do so for us, too, in a greenhouse or conservatory. That’s where beautiful, scented tea roses, so prized in Victorian times, perform best. Teas are usually too tender to survive an English winter, but China roses will bear flowers outside all through an average winter in central London. It’s time both of them enjoyed a revival.

In hot climates, roses also grow taller. It follows that, if you plant a vigorous shrub rose against a warm wall, you can train it as a short climber—ideal for small houses. The Pemberton Musks are excellent house climbers and, nowadays, David Austin sells several of his more vigorous ‘English’ roses as good subjects for a warm wall.