My Top Performing Roses

[Music] roses are my favorite garden plant i use them in my designs almost with every garden i do and i love growing them in my own garden my garden has pretty poor soil for roses it's limestone so it's about ph 8 it's very thin it's very poor we get little rain here because we're in the east midlands and so i have to choose very good doers i have to have roses that will look good with minimal input i don't want to spray them i don't want to add artificial nitrogen and things like that i just want to plant them mulch them and let them do their thing and so i've chosen my top roses that do well for me here that i use a lot in gardens i suppose i have to start with shrub roses first off and the english roses which were bred by david austin my uncle are obviously ones that are close to my heart i have constant spry which was the first rose that he bred of the english roses that won lots of awards and he loved the old-fashioned rose look and that was at a time when hybrid teas were very very popular and so he was really championing the old-fashioned rose but he wanted to produce roses that were had lovely old-fashioned blooms had lots of scent and that repeat flowered now constant spy is fabulous but it didn't have that elusive repeat flowering capacity but it's still it's still a great rose and i've got one because my mother chucked it out it didn't do well for her i think she had it in a pool spot and so she gave it to me and i have it here and i love it i don't spray it or anything but i just enjoy it but lots of clients want repeat flowering roses and david used to get quite annoyed in a way saying that no one expects a shrub to repeat flower you don't expect to buy burnham or eroded engine or anything to repeat flowers so why should a rose but actually he did it he has produced many brilliant repeat flowering roses and of his the one that is my favorite repeat flower is james l austin i love the deep crimson flower and i planted this just at the end of the winter and i was doing a video for showing how to beat rose replant disease and i planted this lovely james l austin and now it's so exciting to see it coming into bloom now and i think roses take a good two years to establish and do really well especially here but even now it's looking pretty good but i think next year and the year after it will just go on getting better and better another shrub rose that i really love because i love stripes and checks but you get stripes and roses is ferdinand pichard and i think that's a wonderful shrub rose it's not one of david's it repeat flowers and it's got beautiful stripey roses that start off pink and crimson and go to white and crimson and here it does so well and it's planted in porcelain and it's just fabulous and it's such a show stopper another shrub rose i use a lot is sally holmes and that is a white shrub rose and white is a very useful characteristic because we often do white gardens or white and blue gardens or white and pink and sally holmes is a very sturdy disease-resistant rose and i grow it in the north against the north-facing wall and i think the light on a north-facing wall is lovely it's not it that they don't burn out so much as in bright bright sunshine so i think you really appreciate the color white on the north facing wall obviously if a rose isn't getting heaps of sun it won't perhaps produce as many flowers on a shady wall but those that it does produce are fabulous so i would always i often try new sally homes on many gardens and if you've got a gardener that's not that experienced they will still perform to perfection on my taller wolf wall i've got madame alfred carrier which is a wonderful old-fashioned repeat flowering scented white shrub which goes outside my bedroom window and i love the fragrance and that's an amazing raise for a north wall then another rose that does so well in poor conditions is pearl drift another white it sort of starts off slightly blush pink and then it goes to a pale or white and it has quite a shiny foliage which i don't like so much i prefer mata foliage but overall it performs brilliantly it dies quite gracefully it stands up to storms and bad weather well so that is a really good doer that i love another amazing rose i don't know why more people don't grow is the bengal beauty and this is a bright red single rose and i got it from nigel slater's garden the english cook and i was entranced for this raise because i was recording with him and it was something like february and then i discovered there was this brilliant red rose that flowered pretty much 12 months a year it's extraordinary and so i took cuttings of that and i now grow that rose and i don't know why it's not better known because i don't know any rows that will flower as often as that now my ones are now quite low they're probably about three foot high because they were four five foot high and i radically cut them down late this winter and so they are shorter and they haven't got so many flowers because the more they grow the more flowers they produce but they will come into their own shortly but it's a rose i'm really glad i've got and i hope we'll have forever you also get the the ground cover roses there's lots of those very modern ones and there's an old-fashioned one which i like particularly which is raw brita and that's got lovely purely like type buds and again i took that from a cutting i'd put it in a client's garden and i didn't have it so i she kindly let me have a cutting and i won't just take one usually there's lots of growth so i might take five or six cuttings and then you're going to be sure to get two three four good plants from it and that's single flowering again but it's unsurpassable i think you go over low walls on banks situations like that and the final shrub rose is pompanella and this is a lovely rose again it looks very much like a peony but it's much taller than raw brita it goes to four foot high also it flowers continuously and you have masses and masses of blooms so this was spread by quarters i think a german rose breeder and i've got this maybe only six seven years ago but i'm really glad i found it and i think it's a fabulous rose you rarely see which surprises me one shrub rose i haven't got that i wanted to get for ages is um mutablus rosa chanensis mutablis and i did order it and then the rose arrived and it came out like yellow or something and it should be it starts off with this lovely sort of coppery buds and then it opens out sort of an apricot and then it finally changes color and ends up in the sort of deep crimson and the great thing about metabolism is it just flowers non-stop all summer long and we grew it on a a garden under some cork oak trees and it survives really well and flowers really well even in those quite shady conditions but i was visiting that garden yesterday so i took some cuttings i put them in i wrapped their stems into some kitchen towel that was very damp put it in a plastic bag kept it in a cool place and i'll take cuttings of it today and i think that will probably root in six or eight weeks time [Music] you see i've taken off the lower leaves i'm going to take off another one and i'm going to take it about that long and i'm going to stick it in towards the edge of the pot and in here in this medium in these pots i've just got about 50 percent perlite the white stuff and 50 compost and it's very moist okay pretty moist so it's a free draining what we call open compost and when you take cuttings it's important to remember first of all that you are um you want healthy growth you don't want to take it from a plant that's not doing well because then obviously the cutting is not going to do well and i usually when i'm doing something a different rose i will actually take some shorter cutting some longer cuttings and hedge my bets a bit here i forgot to take off the flowers you don't want them to flower so if you've got buds or flowers on any cuttings you just remove them with your fingers because you want the energy to go to the roots i'm going to pull that one away there and you've just got a little heel so i'll try one with the heel i don't usually use hormone rooting powder because it has a very short shelf life but i just take more cuttings than i need so i've got extra as an insurance after just seven weeks i've been in moist compost in a cool shady spot the roots have developed beautifully i've now separated each cutting and planted them on in various pot sizes depending on how large their roots are my favorite time to take rose cuttings is when i see them in someone's garden and i discover them and they say oh this is amazing words it does xyz and i saw a lovely climbing road in john kushner's garden who was a gardener's question time panelist with me for many years sadly he's passed away now but i remember in his garden he had this wonderful pink climber and he called it the calendar rose he didn't think that was its real name i don't think it is he didn't know its real name so i took a cutting of it then we did a few programs stayed in ireland for a few days kept it in a hotel brought it back on a plane and then took cuttings when i got home and they rooted and it's so lovely to have a memory of john now in my garden i've never been able to find out the name of this rose but it's spectacular and so although no books that i've read tell you to skate cuttings when they're in bloom that is when i and almost inevitably do it because i seize the chance when i see them in flower and i've never yet failed i have to say so far it's always worked so dead heading is one of the pleasanter gardening jobs i think you can do it in the evening very relaxed and and gently um and i think the thing to remember is that when you're deadheading to start with when you've got a group of roses a bunch of roses you will have one or two individual ways that will go off quicker than the others so i literally just pinched those out either secateurs or fingernails so you have the whole truss still looks good and then when the whole truss has died then you want to cut it off much further down the stem because if you just cut it off just below the top of the truss then you're going to have a very weak point where the rose will re-flower from okay so if you go further down you have a thicker stem so you have a sturdier rose so don't be don't be mean go right back down and cut it off further back than perhaps just behind the dead rose of course not all roses repeat some roses might produce hips in the autumn in which case you don't dead head and you want to see the lovely big crimson hips in the autumn and winter for the birds but otherwise just do that because they look neater they look better and it's a nice thing to do i don't always have time to deadhead everything but when i do i love doing it and i'm glad i've done it [Music] so coming on from the shrub rose as we go to the climbing roses and the rose that i've got growing up my obelisks which i really love is jacques cartier and this is repeat flowering pink rose it flowers all summer long and i grew up with the clematis and the clementines i go with is clematis cross durandii and again that's the longest flowering clematis that i know and i love the combination of the pale pink and the blue and it's very easy to prune you just cut because it's a herbaceous clematis you just cut it down um to about nine inches in the autumn and then it zooms back to life and it's already at the top of the pillars now in june and so i think that's a that's a lovely rose a lovely it can be a climber jack cartier or it can be a shrub rose but i use it as a climber and that is the same with many english shrub roses if you put them against the wall they will be a short climber and the advantages of that is that often many traditional climbing roses just have the roses at the tops and they have what is known as bare bottoms but when you plant an english rose as a climate against a wall you have much more foliage from flowers right down to the ground now probably my favorite climber in my garden is actually a unique repeat flowering rambler and that is phyllis blide and that's got this lovely sort of pinky apricot tones to it it goes on and on and on and it doesn't get too massive and it's on a north wall so even without masses of sunshine it performs probably the best of any climber i know so phyllis wide is a hot frame of me and i use it on a lot of jobs because it tolerates my conditions it always performs and it's very disease free so when you're training climbers against the wall i think people get quite unsure as to what system to use i mean the system i use is often just parallel wires about a foot or so apart with vine eyes at either end so you can have a nice parallel system of wires and then you just tie the roses onto that now my mother used to just get chicken wire and she just used to p pin chicken wire to the wall and her house had stone walls and actually for the first few weeks you notice it but soon it sort of rusted and faded and you didn't notice it and it was covered with the growth of the rose and the reason she liked it is because as many people do when they're training roses they like to actually have a stem and let it go up and then they like to pull it down so you've actually got the the branches actually arching round so you'll have several arches up and over up and over like that on both sides and that's because you're pulling all the hormone down to the tips and so then you'll get lots of flowers coming all the way along the branch whereas if you grow them straight up then often you can get the flowers just at the tips most rambling roses as opposed to climbers will only flower once a year they'll have a lovely broom in the early summer or around july june july time whereas climbers tend to be repeat flowering or single time flowering but it's very unusual for a rambler to be repeat flowering but the one that i grow and i grow on the edge of my woodland is planned the grass and this was a present to me from arabella lennox boyd when i went to stay with her and she goes and collects lots of plants from the wild from seeds and things like that and she had grown this on and she gave me it and it's wonderful on the edge of my woodland tolerating competition from trees in terms of light and moisture but it still is very strong and it grows right up into the trees and it must be growing three four meters high now and spreading almost the same distance and i i think it's really nice and i think that's a lovely way if you want to liven up your edge of your woodland and you're trying to go from an orchard to a wood or a lawn to a wood that's a lovely edge of wood shrub to grow a lovely plant to grow and i'm really pleased with that and when you get really big old stems i'll just come in and chop out the one really dead oh what the really thick stems and then it will send up younger stems it'll be much more vigorous and i'll probably do that sort of august september time something like that and there are extraordinary plants and they they do so well i mean things like kiffskate is really well known and that is a massive one that grows for miles and there are lots of ramblers like that that really are very vigorous and and just go into trees and spread for miles and miles and miles almost [Music] an exciting new range of roses which i planted a couple of years ago when they just came out and these are the timeless series of roses and they were bred by whartons and there's four of them there's timeless cream timeless purple timeless pink and timeless charisma and they are bred as cut flower roses which why i've got them in my vegetable garden because i like my cutting flowers in amongst my vegetables and i think roses next to rhubarb next to artichokes next to potatoes look fantastic and i don't cut huge amounts of flowers for the house i just don't have the time but i like to have the odd bunch and i think this is a brilliant way to do it because it livens up the veg and the veg almost complements the roses in my book and whartons have read these and i think the reason they are different is a they produce flowers on and on and on throughout the growing season b they've got nice long stems which is nice when you want to cut them they have scent and they really stand up to the weather we've had incredible storms and these roses still look amazingly good and when you're cutting a rose for the house you will cut it just above you cut the stain to the length that you want it and you will then cut it just above a leaf node so if you were taking it for a cutting i'd take it just below enough leaf node but for for a cut flower you do it like that and then you'll take off the lower leaves and then you'll put it in water and these are bred to last well in water and these will last for about two weeks so i think they're a fabulous addition to my garden and finally a group of roses that i think are quite neglected are standard roses and this is when you have a stem and you have the rows grafted onto the top and you can have half standards so they're about that high or you can have taller standards so they're grafted at that high and i've used them in my wall garden because i want a bit of height i don't want massively big bucks and roses as bushes but i want the height so by planting a standard i've got exactly that now i've chosen monster wood which i think is a lovely really deep maroony color um and i love that it is slightly diseased prone i must say and the other problem you must realize when you plant standard roses is you will get where it's grafted at the bottom as your often roses are grafted at the bottom if you haven't taken them from cuttings and it will also be grafted at the top so you've got potential for two lots of places for suckering at the bottom and then also at the top where it's crafted so you're just going to keep an eye on that and make sure that you quickly clip off the growth from the suckers so that it's not making the rows check its growth the rows that you want the cultivated rows now if you can have weeping standards i have my monster wood are just ordinary standards but you can have weeping sanders and then they sort of droop down um and people like those and they often put them on those sort of rose domes and so you have them weeping down over the rose domes and you pull them down over those but mine are just ordinary standard roses that i sort of roughly clip and shape as they go on but their lovely way to add a bit of eye level height with having them without having a mass of shrub rose in the ward if perhaps you haven't got much space or whatever so i think that roses are very personal different people like very different roses very different styles but what i think that whatever styles of roses you like they do fit into almost any type of garden they must be the most versatile plant which is why i think roses have been the most popular plant the nation's favorite for hundreds of years and i think they'll never ever go out of fashion and you can't get better than that

Channel: Bunny Guinness

Views: 15,873

Rating: 4.9726496 out of 5

Keywords: roses, climbing roses, standard roses, rambling roses, shrub roses, taking rose cuttings, training roses, supporting roses, growing roses, David Austen, ferdinand pichard, madame alfred carrier rose, bengal beauty rose, phyllis bide rose, james austin rose, raubritter rose, plein de grace rose, jacques cartier rose, constance spry rose, pearl drift rose, pomponella rose, sally holmes rose, roses for cutting, whartons cutting roses, mutablis

Id: U2wLV2E1cYI

Length: 21min 25sec (1285 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021