Riot Of Roses

Adrienne Wild celebrates the blooms and scents of the best roses from the past 10 years.

It’s essential to make room for roses. You’ll not only enjoy their sumptuous blooms and mood-lifting fragrances, but also see them bring your summer garden alive with bees and butterflies.

The ideal spot to fill your garden with fragrance is a border that you will walk past every day and where the sun shines for at least six hours. Add a bench and, from June to September, it will become a fragrant paradise and definitely your favourite place in the garden to sit and unwind!

Choosing a rose

The choice of rose varieties is definitely overwhelming, but can be shortlisted if you start with those rose experts have selected as best for fragrance.

For picture-perfect roses with most provocative fragrances, check out those that have won Rose of the Year for all-round performance and excellent disease-resistance and plant now for an instant garden.

Winner for this year, is the aptly named  ‘Scent From Heaven’, bred in Britain by Chris Warner, who is renowned for his climbing and rambling roses. It’s a fuss-free climber with an eventual height of 2-3m, so ideal for creating that classic ‘roses around the door’ look.

Throughout summer, it can be relied upon to produce an abundance of lush apricot-orange blooms that unfurl from classic buttonhole buds, which have a rich fruity, peach-like fragrance.

Last year, the Hybrid Tea ‘Sunny Sky’ won the coveted award for its honey yellow blooms, which have a slight fruity fragrance. It’s a great border plant with a height and spread of 1m x 50cm.