A sweet disorder

Moor Wood, Gloucestershire Charles Quest-Ritson visits the National Collection of rambling roses, which shows these most romantic of plants at their very finest

- Charles Quest-Ritson

THE National Collection of Rambler Roses at Moor Wood is a glorious tableau of colour, beauty and scent, worth a long journey to see at the height of its midsummer loveliness. The collection began in 1983 and is still expanding, thanks to the commitment of Henry and Susie Robinson, who put it together and remain faithful to their dream of collecting all known varieties of rambler roses before they are lost to gardens and gardeners. Most were bred between 1890 and 1930; many are rare and some are extinct, at least in Britain. Making the collection is conservation in action.

It all came about in an unusual way. The Robinsons were about to be married and knew that, eventually, they would take over the big house at Moor Wood. They decided that they needed a good theme to resurrect the two-acre garden and adapt it to modern exigencies. This was a time when Plant Heritage, then known as the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens [NCCPG], was looking for people to establish National Collections (‘I lost my heart to a hosta’, July 22, 2015).

The Robinsons’ friend Andrew Lyndon- Skeggs showed them a list of the genera for which the NCCPG was hoping to find custodians and the Robinsons realised immediately that rambler roses were a perfect choice for the Cotswold stone of their walled garden, fitting with the wild, rather romantic effect they thought they could create. Ten years later, the 100 different roses they had planted were recognised by the NCCPG as the National Collection of Rambling Roses. Still expanding, it now stretches to more than 150 ramblers—Multifloras, Wichuranas, Ayrshires, Sempervirens hybrids and more.