What my busy family likes most about floribundas is that they are practically as easy to grow and to maintain, in our southern Michigan landscape as common hardy shrubs.
Actually, floribundas are hardy shrubs in every sense of the word.
And who could ask more of a plant that blooms all season, beginning the first spring and continuing year after year?
Good Planting Process And Culture Of Floribundas
Their hardiness and ease of planting and culture make floribundas a good bet for any gardener who has been discouraged from rose growing because of the laborious planting and growing techniques they thought necessary.
Roses deserve good care to assure vigorous, well-balanced growth, but undue pampering with excessive feeding and watering is often the unsuspected cause of disappointment.
As a matter of fact, floribundas will do very well in any sunny spot with well-drained soil that is good enough to grow a good crop of vegetables.
You may be reassured to know that I plant floribundas in a hole dug only a shovel deep and a little more than a shovel wide.
My “rose garden” has moderately well-drained, medium-heavy clay soil, so I mix some compost or some granulated peat with the topsoil before replacing it in the hole.
I rarely lost any of my roses, their only protection being a mound of the earth drawn up around the canes in late autumn.
Related: Easy Growing Versatile Floribunda Rose
Breeder-Developed Floribundas
Breeders developed floribundas to provide an easier to grow, hardier, longer, and more free-blooming rose than available in the hybrid teas.
Their ancestry consists mainly of the hybrid tea with its large, finely turned blooms, and the polyantha, with its free blooming habit and a high degree of hardiness.
Occasionally a wild rose has been introduced in the parentage of a floribunda to increase hardiness.
Compact Growth Of Floribundas
In addition to being hardier, the floribunda tends to make somewhat bushier and more compact growth than its hybrid tea parent.
Its blossoms tend to be a little smaller than those of the hybrid tea and larger than those of the polyantha.
They combine the exquisite form, brilliant color, and the size and aroma of hybrid teas with the old polyantha class’s free-flowering clustered habit of bloom.
Various Uses Of Floribundas
Floribundas are suitable to the formal garden, but they have an even broader use as color accents in the landscape, in small random groupings or large, massed plantings.
Floribundas are available in a wide range of colors.
Award-winning newcomers and many others equally outstanding swell the variety lists each year.