Flower Gardens

» Cottage_Garden - Growing Roses

I just started a series of articles on how to buy a "good" healthy rose. Getting a good start is important. I'll write more about roses in future articles.

Roses need lots of sun, good drainage (ie not a damp soggy wet spot) and good air circulation. Those are the main requirements -- and start with a healthy good quality specimen of a variety suited to your area and your garden maintenance routine. Also look for varieties that are specially noted for their disease resistance.

Certain varieties tend to do better in certain climates, for instance what grows well in Texas or Atlanta with extremely hot and humid summers may not do well in Chicago where summers are hot and humid but short and winter is brutal or Boston where summers are cool and winters are brutal, or Seattle where summers are cool and winters are mild, or southern California where it never gets very cold and the growing season is year round, or Phoenix which is sunny about 800 days a year and desert dry. A few such as Knock Out seem to do well just about everywhere.

Hybrid tea roses are the fussy ones of the bunch but recent breeding seems to be heading toward finding disease and pest resistant varieties even among those. Since these tend to have the most spectacular flowers, I sure wish they would hurry up! (It's not like a rose breeder can snap their fingers and get a new one -- the process is incredibly painstaking, long and full of failure.)

Hybrid tea roses often have winter hardiness issues. If you garden in zone 6 or colder, check the winter hardiness of any rose before you purchase it.

If you are in a colder winter area such as zone 6 or colder, plant roses grown on their own roots rather than grafted. If you plant a grafted rose, you will have to take special measures to protect the graft from the winter cold.

Try a "low maintenance" landscape or shrub rose such as Knock Out or Bonica for easier care and lots of blooms. Here is a photo of Bonica blooms.

Rugosa roses are very easy to grow, they are very cold tolerant and actually hate to be sprayed.

The Buck roses are also very cold tolerant, sturdy plants.

I am sure there are as many opinions about roses as there are rose growers. There are casual rose growers who have one or two in their yard, and serious rosarians who grow roses to show or who have hundreds and hundreds of roses in their garden. I would love to hear from anyone growing roses at whatever level -- roses are beautiful!

-- posted by Cottage_Garden