Revisiting the bent rose

Revisiting the Bent Rose

It's mid-June, and we're returning to the Rose Garden to revisit the dome-shaped 'Gipsy Boy' rose that we tied down to benders in winter to stimulate more flowering. Let's look at next steps, as well as how to choose roses and pair them with other plants.

Our winter pruning and tying down to benders is now rewarding us – the bud points along the horizontal stems have broken into 30cm-long shoots topped with flowers.

Deadheading

Deadhead your roses for longer flowering and to return energy back into the plant.

• Loosely tap a flower stem – if the flower starts to dissolve, cut it off back to a healthy leaf.
• If your rose has nice hips, you can leave some spent blooms to produce hips.
• In this case, simply crumble off the faded petals to leave the base of the flower that will become the hip.

Choosing Roses

With careful selection, rose flowering season can cover 6-8 weeks:

• starts around the second week of May with Rosa spinosissima
• the mainstay is the damask, centifolia and gallica roses
• ends with ramblers.

Think about what else you can grow with your roses to break up the domed shapes. We use a lot of verticals, such as foxgloves, lupins, delphiniums and tripods of sweet peas, for different shapes and to continue the season through the summer.

Think about colours – this will set the mood you want to create.

• Yellow and orange roses give a joyous mood.
• We choose more melancholy colours like purple, pink and lilac, as these work best in the lighting conditions on the west side of the Rose Garden.
• Think about form, flower shape and scent. Place scented roses to make the most of the scent, e.g. on the corner of two paths.

Identifying Next Year's Flowering Shoots

• The shoots that aren't flowering will bear next year's flowers, so leave these alone.
• They will grow into long stems that you can bend and tie in during winter pruning.
• Some of the already bent stems may flower again and could be re-bent, but you want a balance between growth stems and flowering stems.

Plant Directory

Delphinium species and cultivars

Larkspurs

Hardy herbaceous perennials or annuals

Ranunculaceae

Digitalis purpurea and its cultivars and forms

Foxgloves

Hardy herbaceous biennials or short-lived perennials

Plantaginaceae

Lathyrus odoratus cultivars

Sweet peas

Hardy annuals

Fabaceae

Lupinus species and cultivars

Lupins

Hardy or half-hardy annuals, short-lived perennials or herbaceous perennials

Fabaceae

Rosa 'Dunwich Rose'

Scotch rose 'Dunwich Rose'

Hardy deciduous shrub

Rosaceae

Rosa spinosissima species and cultivars

Scotch roses

Hardy deciduous shrubs

Rosaceae

Rosa spinosissima 'William III'

Scotch rose 'William III'

Hardy deciduous shrub

Rosaceae

Rosa 'Zigeunerknabe'

'Gipsy Boy' rose

Hardy deciduous shrub

Rosaceae

Glossary

Centifolia roses

Cultivars of Rosa × centifolia, an old shrub rose bred in the 17th century, with large, densely packed, globular blooms and a strong, sweet fragrance that has long been used in perfumery. Also known as cabbage roses or Provence roses, these were bred by hybridising a damask rose with an alba rose.

Damask roses

Cultivars of Rosa × damascena. Another old group of shrub roses, said to have originally been brought to the UK from the Middle East by the Crusaders. Nearly all are fragrant, and the flowers, which are held in open airy bunches, have long been used in perfumery.

Deadhead

Removing spent flowerheads after flowering has finished to promote the production of more flowers or prevent seeding.

Gallica roses

Cultivars of Rosa gallica – short bushy shrub roses in a wide range of colours that are easy to grow and thrive in poor soils. Probably the oldest of all garden roses, these were grown by the Greeks and Romans. In the 17th century the Dutch started to breed new varieties, which the French continued on a large scale.

Stamens

The male reproductive parts of a flower, bearing pollen.