Postcard from Hampton Court: Of grey roses

I have a little ritual whenever I visit the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show: I visit the Roses and Romance marquee to have a look at the latest Rose of the Year.

I'm secretly in love with roses: I keep trying to give up growing them, as they're far too romantical-like for my wellies-and-wasabi mental picture of myself as a gardener. But they keep wriggling back in somehow. I'm currently hatching a plan to sneak more in under the guise of being species roses, therefore having hips which are officially Useful.

Anyway: this year, it's 'You're Beautiful', bred by Graham Fryer: pic above. Very pink, very classic, rather handsome in a Barbara Cartland sort of way: this shade of candy pink isn't quite my thing but I could see why it won.

However: while I was there I began to notice there is an ominous trend which is creeping into the rosey world. They've started breeding grey roses.
 

This is 'Grey Dawn': it's the colour of faded curtains, or the dresses in BBC costume dramas, or maybe the papery skin of old ladies. This picture makes it look quite nice, but believe me, it's grey.

I blame the recent unseemly race to breed a true blue rose: it produced a lot of roses they said were blue when in fact they were undeniably lilac. 'Rhapsody in Blue' was about the closest they got (even David Austin admits it's purple, but 'fades to slate blue' with age). Here's another one, 'Blue for You' (with apologies for the lack of focus):

 

See what I mean? Lilac.

Luckily the Japanese put an end to all that a few years ago with a bit of genetic engineering injecting a delphinium gene into a rose to make The Blue Rose (still think it's a bit violet though). But the experiments have left their legacy.

As well as the grey roses, there are brown roses: a wave of washed-out colour that isn't apricot and isn't cream and isn't anything, really. This one reminds me of a properly nice apricot (Apricot Silk, perhaps) smudged down with one of those blues or greys:



It's 'Julia's Rose': and it's beige. I like it better than the grey one, but it's definitely a meh sort of colour.

Part of the problem is that these colours are so hard to place in the border. One of my neighbours has 'Rhapsody in Blue' planted among a little mini rose garden outside her house (she's elderly, so be nice). She's bang up to date: but that's the one rosebush that doesn't look right. It's weird, out of synch, the wrong colour for roses.

On the other hand, all this messing with what is good and right has had some positive side-effects. Once you go down the brown route, you reach a fork in the road: the poo option is clearly to be avoided, so obviously the only way is chocolate.

And this is where brown roses start to show why they should exist. Just look at this.

It's 'Hot Chocolate', a sumptuous floribunda that justifies all the misguided breeding efforts in the world if the point of them was to lead to this. Yum, yum.

Postcard from Hampton Court: Friday

This gentle joke was tucked away in a corner of the Pococks Roses stand in the Wonderland of Roses marquee. It made me smile: especially since the rose it was referring to was right next door.


Rosa 'Nostalgia' (Pococks Roses)

The Grand Tour #5: The Terraced Bit

Last but not least: the closest we get to a front garden. There is a bit to the right of the drive which is almost an afterthought: it's the sixty feet or so that occupies the gap between the drive and the garage. But it's actually the most formal of all the gardens: making its way down the hill by means of a series of rather lovely terraces, held in place by retaining walls, and - amazingly for this garden - more or less flat and straight.

This has given me delusions of grandeur. I have nowhere else in the garden where I can garden formally, and I have a bit of a soft spot for clipped box hedging. However I also need a cutting garden: so I am combining the two into....

The Parterre Garden

You can see the terracing better looking back up towards the house...


Imagine, if you will, a square (or maybe a rectangle) of box in the centre of each terrace, perhaps a curlicue or a squiggle, or an abstract pattern in the style of Tom Stuart-Smith at Broughton. I could even go for the raised look: they had some fine examples at Hatfield House on that Alan Titchmarsh programme the other week.

(Incidentally, they got their parterres and their knots hopelessly entangled in that programme. Repeat after me: parterre hedges have flat tops and a uniform height, knot garden hedges weave over and under each other. They had both on that programme, but Mr Titchmarsh went on and on about the parterres at Hatfield being knot gardens, and then they had a beautiful knot garden which he referred to as a parterre. Was I the only one shouting at my telly?)

Anyway. The point is, I shall fill the gaps in between with dozens and dozens of annual flowers for cutting: cosmos, love-in-a-mist, tulips, anthemis, sweetpeas, cornflowers, Ammi majus, some fennel and stocks and larkspur and.... you get the idea.


The log store, on the top terrace, is... well... less than edifying, and extremely overgrown. I may be commissioning my carpenter husband to do something deliciously gorgeous there instead. It has also, as you can see, been used as a compost heap by the previous lot of people, who kindly left their monster pile of garden rubbish for us to make use of - though I'm going to have to do a lot of shifting around into proper compost bins first.

There is also, according to the plans, a well under that compost heap. We await the alarmed cry and distant splash which will tell us it hasn't, after all, been capped off.

The plant life is little more than overgrown shrubs: some are quite nice. This cotoneaster is in very full berry...

...and there's a fine cotinus at the other end. Both, however, aren't quite nice enough to out-compete the parterres. Though the cotinus may find a new home somewhere: I do like them. Something to do with that chocolatey shade of purple.

And the inevitable rose. This one is fighting it out with a rampant clematis in the corner: so far it's survived against all the odds, so I have a certain admiration for such gritty determination. And besides, it's very pretty even in November. It stays. For now.

The Grand Tour #1: The Hilly Bit

Some time ago I promised you a tour around my new garden in a little more detail. Well, now that we're here, there are no further excuses: so let me take you for a little wander around the garden I now call home.

Imagine if you will a very long and quite thin bit of land along the edge of a lane, south-facing but aligned more or less east-west, and about the shape of an aeroplane wing. It is tapered at each end and has a broader bit (to about 50ft wide) in the middle. Now plonk a house in the middle of the broader bit and divide the whole thing into three by means of a footpath running through a third from one end, and a garage interrupting another third from the other end, and you have the basic layout.

We have three main 'gardens' (though one is actually a field with pretensions - in my head anyway - to become an orchard): the first bit is my fledgling veg garden and I've already shown visitors to m'other blog around so you'll have to go have a look there if you're interested.

The next bit is the main garden: the bit that wraps around the house and is about a third of an acre, give or take a bit.

In my head it is already a beautifully-crafted, well planned and exquisitely planted garden of various different parts, so come with me in my imagination and contemplate:

Part 1: The Woodland Garden(aka The Hilly Bit)

By this I mean the back half of the back garden, which slopes gently upwards towards the footpath between it and what we call the top field. In this photo you'll have to avert your eyes from the large blue monstrosity in the middle: essential for keeping small children distracted, but a total eyesore. We have ambitious plans which involve terracing a bit just in front of the hill so we can move it back and to the side, and well out of the way.

Incidentally the 'lawn' (I use the term advisedly) is probably staying for a while at least, as there are rumours in the village of a spectacular display of sheets of snowdrops bringing admirers from miles around. Not so sure about the admirers, but rather fancy the snowdrops.


Anyway, to take this photo you'd be standing with your back to the trampoline, looking west up the hill: a space of about 50ft wide by 60ft long. What you are seeing is not in fact a somewhat daunting and rather shady slope full of weeds and overhung with neglected trees: it is in fact a choice woodland garden, dotted here and there by pretty birches and hazels and underplanted with lovely woodlanders like trilliums, ferns and bluebells. A path zigzags its way artlessly up the slope to the back, with occasional flights of wooden steps for those wishing to take a more direct route. At the top, to the left, is a rustic-style playhouse and den, made by my rather talented garden carpenter hubby and nestling into the corner and providing a perfect retreat for small children and later sulky teenagers, as well as being a nice little focal point when you get to the top of the slope and emerge into its clearing.

See? You've got to have imagination to look at this lot. Plenty of fairly colourful imagination.

Elsewhere in this section: this is a quarry, which has the great advantage of being superbly sheltered, and the rather daunting prospect of very high chalk banks at either side. Where the arrow is - that's just about where the bank stops and the hedge starts. The top of the hedge is another 8ft or so above that. We are thinking scaffolding.

The opposite side of the garden, on the lane side (which is also the shady side). Another bank, this time more gently sloped, and therefore offering some intriguing possibilities for terraces up towards the foot of hedge this side. I'm thinking zigzag paths again, and a rather spectacular collection of ferns, podyphyllums, astilboides.... I have Keith Wiley's gorgeous and inspirational book on gardening in shade on my bookshelf and I shall plunder it shamelessly.

There are actually some quite nice plants here already. Someone way back in the dim and distant past (not, I'm sorry to say, our immediate predecessors here) was a pretty good and knowledgeable gardener: although he/she didn't quite cotton on to the fact that roses don't like chalk and therefore there are a lot of rather sick rose bushes cluttering the place up. Not this one, though, which is some sort of Rosa alba I think and therefore tough enough to scoff in the face of non-ideal soil types.

Clematis are everywhere: this is much to my delight as I have always rather struggled to grow clematis before. This one is in the main garden but I now also have a monster hedge (as if we didn't have enough hedges) of a pink C. montana - either 'Elizabeth' or var. rubens, not sure yet - on the front wall which promises spectacular sights in spring.

And my pride and joy, and if I'm honest, one of the reasons I bought the house; this is of course Ginkgo biloba, a plant I have always wanted to grow as I just adore those leaves. Now instead of struggling to persuade a stringly little sapling to grow into a proper plant, I have all to myself a really big, mature tree, maybe 30ft high, and as hale and hearty as they come. What's more - this picture was taken a few weeks ago and now all those leaves have turned the most vivid shade of butter yellow you can imagine. What a tree.

Roses in November

When the Irish poet Thomas Moore went on in a lamenting sort of way about 'the last rose of summer' it was 1805 and I'd guess he wasn't looking at routine double-figure temperatures in November.

There is no last rose of summer any more. There might be a last rose of late winter at some point, I suppose, but this is, these days, a late summer or autumn flower. If not a winter one.

Certainly here it is, November tomorrow, and my garden is full of roses.


An unidentified miniature patio rose growing in the kids' garden.

Rosa 'Perpetually Yours'

A budding Rosa 'Dublin Bay'

Lots of buds on my container-grown Rosa 'Wildeve'

and the Rosa 'New Dawn' on the front of the house is flowering its heart out still.
I just can't make my mind up if I like it.

I love that my garden is full of roses: who couldn't like that? But they look all wrong among the autumn leaves somehow.

And can you imagine having roses on the table for Christmas dinner?

A week in Northumberland #2: Alnwick Gardens

The most celebrated gardens in Northumberland are without doubt those of Alnwick Castle. As it happens, they're also among the newest: a slightly hyperactive television series a few years ago brought their creation to public attention and they've been a big talking point ever since.

Designed by the Belgian landscapers Jacques and Peter Wirtz, and enabled by the dynamic, lively and therefore not-very-Duchess-like Duchess of Northumberland, they are among the most exciting gardens in the country. I loved the mix of the historic and the very modern, the celebration of plants, and above all how much sheer laugh-out-loud fun it all was.


At the heart of the garden is water. This is the only garden I've come across which takes such great delight in reviving the 500-year-old Italian Renaissance sport of Giochi d'Acqua - garden water games. The massive central cascade that dominates the garden is highly dramatic at the best of times - but when it plays, on the hour and on the half-hour, it's enough to make you gape in wonder.


The garden luxuriates in water: it's just everywhere. I loved these funky swirly rills...


...and the way this fountain pours down the steps from the European Garden at the top.


Best of all there are no 'keep off' signs here: the kids are positively encouraged to get wet (you're advised to take a spare set of clothing for them in the brochure) and my girls couldn't believe their luck.

Now in case you're wondering where all the plants are...


The Ornamental Garden at the top of the cascade is on just as grand a scale as the rest of the garden. It's the sort of place where (at the risk of sounding like an M&S advert) you don't just have a pergola: you have a hand-built, 20-foot-high pergola swagged with roses around a bubbling pool. You don't just have a seating area: you have a staggeringly high dome of elegantly-wrought iron clothed in rambling roses and Clematis montana and get a crick in your neck looking at it. Well... you get the general picture.

The formal structure here is just marvellous, and also breathtaking in its scale. Parterre after parterre clicks into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, defined by crisp box and secluded by pleached crabapples. Like the water cascades, it's a modern design celebrating ancient traditions.

The middle parterres were filled with a froth of roses - this one's 'Just Joey', and the scent was heavenly.

The surrounding beds, along the mellow old brick walls, were where the plantsperson's delights were. Now, at the risk of sounding like I'm carping, it wasn't the most inspiring planting I've ever seen: but in their defence, I think I probably caught the borders in their mid-summer slump, and I suspect they would have looked less weary earlier, or indeed later in the year.

Which is not to say there weren't some choice finds in there.

Don't you just love this blue? The bluest blue salvia I've ever seen, labelled as S. patens 'Blue Angel'.

Bees were everywhere: here squeezing the last few drops of nectar from Anthemis tinctoria 'Susan Mitchell'. I liked the way they left the heads on instead of dead-heading (my usual knee-jerk reaction to anthemis at the end of its season): they looked like palest yellow pincushions dancing in the breeze.

And last but not least, I discovered this extraordinary hydrangea. It's H. sargentiana, with giant leaves the sultry rough green of old velvet and flowers the slate-purple of a thundery afternoon. Big and moody: I loved it.

For more about the garden, and the many new projects the Duchess has planned for the coming years (including a skating lake - worth a return visit for that alone) there's a website to visit; or you can come back here tomorrow for part two.

Summer-pruning roses

About this time I find all my roses, and everyone else's too, are getting a bit wayward.

They've mostly finished flowering, bar a few late flushes, and they suddenly start shooting great thick stems skywards in a bid to take over the world. This is a Good Thing on the whole, as it means they're very healthy and well-established, and you should be able to look forward to a nice handsome display next year.

However - if they're anything like the 'Perpetually Yours' climbers on the fence between me and my neighbour, they can become a serious hazard. This summer while my back was turned they shot up several massive stems above the fence, a good 6ft long, which began waving about spectacularly in the recent gales threatening to whip off the heads of sundry children and household pets passing by.

'Perpetually Yours', incidentally, is a lovely rose covered in froths of pretty frou-frou noisette flowers in palest yellow. I have two, which took a while to establish in my sandy acid soil, but which are now spectacular each summer. Their only real shortcoming is that they don't stand up to weather very well, dissolving into soggy brown soup in heavy rain, like many roses I've found - a problem strangely unmentioned in the brochures. Mind you, the tried-and-tested favourites - 'New Dawn' and 'Dublin Bay' in my garden - seem to escape this problem.

But I digress. The point is, everyone talks about pruning roses in late spring (or late winter, if you're me) but nobody mentions that they need summer pruning, too. This time of year I end up picking thorns out of my fingers yet again, tying in wayward stems and cutting out any heading in the wrong direction.

I also cut back those long flowered stems by about a third - some of this has been done already in deadheading (which I'm intolerably bad at getting around to, though it doesn't seem to make much difference to the number of flowers I get) but there are always some which still flap about. This summer pruning will to some degree restrict growth, as all summer pruning does - but it's sometimes no bad thing to give roses a rap on the knuckles when they're getting too full of the joys of summer. Just don't do it any later in the season, as new growth will get knocked back by frost if it hasn't had the chance to harden off in time.

Camellia problems

I was up in the 3/4 acre woodland garden I look after the other day, and cutting back a camellia which was overhanging the pathway quite badly (this is the kind of thing I spend most of my time doing in this particular garden - the amount of green waste I remove from there has to be seen to be believed!)

I noticed pretty quickly that behind the curtain of fresh green leaves there was a problem. All the older leaves were covered in a sticky, black sooty mould, which not only looked nasty but also couldn't have been doing the shrub much good.

I wasn't quite sure myself what was causing it - I thought aphids of some sort, since this is what causes it on roses (the aphids secrete honeydew, which drips on the leaves below and is consequently colonised by the fungal sooty mould). I was a bit unsure about this since I've never heard of aphids attacking camellias to any great degree.

Anyway - I came back and looked it up, and thanks to the dear old RHS I discovered we almost certainly have not aphids, but Camellia cushion scale.

I have to go back and check whether there are yellow-brown scale insects near the veins (or indeed "white waxy egg masses"). But everything else fits.

The good news is, this is just the right time of year to control it. I'm going to have to spray; I'll try the organic version first (Growing Success Bug Killer or Vitax Organic 2in1) and if that doesn't work, I'll zap it with the very un-environmentally friendly Provado. My client tells me he has a backpack sprayer in his garage (the shrub is about 15ft tall) - so time to tog up and do battle!

Back from Chelsea

I've just spent a couple of weeks away from the garden - at the Chelsea Flower Show (fantastic!) where I have had the privilege of a press pass for the last couple of years now, and then on my hols in the Isle of Wight.

More of Chelsea later if I get a moment... but what is it about going away even for a short amount of time that makes your garden suddenly decide it's going to romp away and grow for England? Since I last looked at it, the Goliath poppies have burst into action, to say nothing of several self-seeded orientals - some are a beautiful clear orange, the first time that particular colour has turned up, and really unusual. My roses are blooming fit to bust (Dublin Bay - a scarlet climber - is particularly lovely), and several smaller shrubs have simply disappeared under the mass of vegetation that's suddenly burgeoning from every corner.

Not that I'm complaining: June in my garden is fabulous, and the peak of the whole show. It's so lovely to look out of your window and just stare, transfixed by something that's in your own back garden. What a privilege.

Pruning standard roses

Continuing on the roses theme... I found myself this morning faced with a couple of standard roses - at least, they used to be standard roses but they've now grown several variations on the theme, including long upright shoots from halfway up the main stem, and one of them has sprouted a curious double-head to the standard. By this I mean the main stem has burst out with a second ring of shoots about a couple of inches below the first. The second rose is even odder - it's not really a standard, strictly speaking, as it has two main stems, each of which has a standard head.

What to do? One bit is easy - I've already sliced off the shoots growing up the stem. I'm inclined to prune back the first rose to the lower ring of shoots - the top ring isn't much to write home about, and it's right up against a fence, too. It'll make the rose a bit weedy this year, which won't make my client very happy, but needs must and I hope he'll understand! The second one I think I'll just leave for now and make it into the double-standard it wants to be. It'll be a curiosity if nothing else!

Just for the notebook: pruning standard roses (when they aren't as wierd as the ones above) is easy. You simply cut back the shoots by a third to an outward-facing bud in late winter/early spring. If the head is a bit overcrowded, cut out inward-growing or crossing shoots at the base to generally thin out the crown. And as with all roses, get rid of any dead and diseased wood completely. And that's it!

Banksian roses

In two of my gardens now I've come across a Banksian rose, and in both cases the owners didn't know what they'd got. The sad thing is, that meant the roses had never flowered - because they'd been pruned in the late winter, like regular climbing roses.

Banksian roses are wonderful, though very rampant, climbers which flower on last year's growth. So every time you clip them, you're taking flowers off. Instead of pruning them at this time of the year - which will remove all last year's growth and therefore this year's flowers - you have to wait until the plant has flowered in May/June.

Then you either remove entire stems to reduce the size (and these are really, really big plants - they cover entire houses without even thinking about it) or take back side shoots to 3-4 buds. That'll give the plant plenty of time to produce new wood to flower the following year.

If you do prune it right, the plant will reward you with the most beautiful flowers - clusters of palest yellow buttons in profusion all over the plant. The species is white, but most plants turn out to be Rosa Banksia lutea - the yellow version, and a beautiful shade of yellow it is, too.

Roses in hedges

It's rose-pruning season: I've been pruning roses nearly every day for a week or so, from shrubs to climbers to ramblers. My secateurs (Felco no 9's, in case you're an anorak) are fair worn out.

In one of the bigger gardens I look after, there's a rather neglected hedge of Rosa Hansa - a rugosa hybrid that's covered in surprisingly soft downy bristles and which, as I discovered to my cost, suckers like crazy. I spent much of my three-hour session there on my hands and knees in the mud (and rain) heaving at inch-thick stems that had burst from the ground up to a metre away. Such are the delights of a gardener's life...!

Rose hedges don't require a lot of work for the pleasure they provide. A quick once-over to tame them in winter (suckers allowing - better to keep on top of these year-round rather than let them get out of control like my Hansa hedge), and that's it for the rest of the year - for which care they reward you with (in the case of Hansa) deep pinkish-crimson flowers with a heavenly scent, followed by fat luscious hips.

The daunting and supremely Victorian rose expert, Gertrude Jekyll, had quite a bit to say about rose hedges in her classic Roses for Gardens (1909). She recommends tipping young shoots to promote bushy growth and prevent the legginess that invariably afflicts roses left to do their own thing:

"If in July [strong young shoots from the base] are shortened about a third, instead of continuing their growth in length, their energy goes to strengthening the shortened piece that is left," she says. "This will then, the following season, be thickly set with flowering laterals that will clothe the lower part of the hedge."

And just as a post-script: in this same chapter she takes the trouble to urge gardeners to learn from doing, not reading about it:

"It is more helpful to show one simple thing that is easily understood, and that awakens interest and enthusiasm... than it is to prompt the learner at every step, fussing like an anxious nurse, and doing for him, what, if his enthusiasm is true and deep and not mere idle froth, will give him more pleasure in the doing, and more profit in the learning, than if it were all done for him," she writes.

"For the very essence of good gardening is the taking of thought and trouble. No-one can do good decorative work who does it merely from a written recipe."

You have been told!