Roses thrive in the moist, well-structured soil homemade compost helps to deliver, and you can keep them blooming beautifully year after year with annual mulching. Use disease-resistant modern cultivars or plant a species rose, which may only flower once a year, but most also produce large hips after the blooms have faded. Then encircle your roses with annuals and perennials for a long-lasting display.
When selecting roses, look for disease- resistance and repeat-flowering shrub varieties, which will bloom throughout summer and early autumn if you remove the faded flowers regularly. Also look for those with fragrant flowers that will greet you with their sweet perfume as you enter the garden. Good choices include the white ‘Winchester Cathedral’, apricot ‘Buff Beauty’, and yellow ‘Charlotte’, although specialist rose breeders will have hundreds to choose from in a wide range of colors on their websites. Species roses such as Rosa moyesii and R. glauca offer an alternative. Most have a more relaxed habit than named roses but they too are disease-resistant and their colorful hips are an added bonus.
TOP TIP WHEN THE BLOOMS OF REPEAT-FLOWERING ROSES FADE, CUT THEM OFF WITH SHARP PRUNERS. DEADHEADING IN THIS WAY WILL STIMULATE THE PLANT TO MAKE MORE BLOOMS AND KEEP IT LOOKING NEAT.
Lavender and hardy geraniums such as the blue Rozanne are often combined with roses, and look especially beautiful if paired with pink cultivars. When choosing other perennial or annual partners, check that they will not grow so tall that they cast shade on your rose and select those that have contrasting shapes and colors. For example, the spiked flowerheads of perennials such as veronicas, salvias, and loosestrife (Lythrum) work well with the rounded shape of most rose bushes, while Erigeron daisies and the frothy lime-green blooms of Alchemilla mollis will make a pretty skirt around their prickly stems.
Choose a site in full sun for the best rose display and create a new bed in autumn or spring as described for making a flowerbed. Roses appreciate a rich soil, so incorporate a bucketful of homemade compost into the soil where you plan to plant them. Then dig a hole a little deeper and twice the diameter of the container in which you bought the rose. Place the rose in its container into the hole and, using a bamboo cane, check that the graft union (the swelling at the base of the stems) will be below the surface when the rose is planted. Wearing gloves, tip the rose out of its pot and place it in the hole, then backfill with the compost-enriched soil and firm it down around the plant.
Water in the rose thoroughly before applying a 2in (5cm) layer of homemade compost, making sure that it does not touch the stems. Keep the rose well-watered during the first growing season and reapply the mulch each year, in autumn on clay soils or in spring if you have sandy soil.
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