Rose enthusiasts are increasing astonishingly in numbers and knowledge. Beginners and experienced gardeners decorate their grounds using hybrid teas and floribundas.
Where and how to place them for full effectiveness combined with successful rose culture is a problem that always calls for study, often for ingenuity.
Most Attractive Rose Setting
Culturally, roses thrive only in the sun and good soil, without too strenuous competition from more rampant neighbors.
Design-wise, they are rarely showy as single plants hut needs to be used in groups of three to six of a kind, at least. Companion plants should not overpower the roses in profusion or color at the height of their bloom.
The most attractive setting for roses alone is the patterned garden. Roses are best grown in narrow beds so that they can be reached from all sides for pruning, spraying, and flower removal. This necessity means that a small garden with little space will hold several roses.
If there is room for more than one flower garden in the place, however, most people are reluctant to grow only roses. The various beds of a pattern garden might be apportioned according to individual enthusiasms.
For Edges Or Beds
For an edge, one center bed or two narrow side beds could use bold hybrid teas in the middle with low-growing floribundas.
The wider beds in the design are reserved for perennials, bulbs, and annuals, or all three. Such a garden has one great advantage; when roses have quiet spells in spring and midsummer, other flowers carry the color theme.
Where the property’s overall design does not allow for a pattern garden, roses combine well with perennials in a long border.
They need special locations; otherwise, fast-growing perennials crowd out the roses in a border 6’ to 7’ feet wide. Groups of 3’ to 5’ tall floribunda, or hybrid teas, would serve as accents at the rear.
The Spring Bloomers
Spring-blooming perennials, or those with shallow roots, such as aquilegia, pyrethrum, flax, and bellflower, are good companions for roses.
Rampant-growing plants give them too hard a time; the more the roses are fed, the huskier their competitors become.
The low-growing floribundas may be used at intervals along the front or in special groups at either end in a narrow flower border.
Their perennial neighbors should permit the roses to be the main show at their bloom period, with those at the rear providing a backdrop of good foliage.
A delightful spot for a few roses is a sunny corner formed by two wings of the house, near a doorway or under a window. Here the roses should be chosen for fragrance and the perfect form of bud and full-blown rose.
The varieties should be as immune as possible to mildew and blackspot so that the disfiguration of spraying or disease is not a constant blemish.
Adding a plant or two of lavender and a border of sweet alyssum or petunias achieves an outdoor potpourri of blended fragrance.
Around the cottage type of house, floribundas of constant growth and good foliage form the most attractive foundation planting.
One variety is enough—usually a floriferous strong color like Fashion, Geranium Red, or Orange Ruffles.
The Aachens are also handsome, where lower heights and paler colors fit. Another friendly locale for these roses is around the border of a vegetable or flower garden.
The taller-growing floribundas used as a hedge or trained along a wife fence outline the property strikingly.
Flower Gardens And Shrub Borders
If roses do not fit into the flower garden or near the house, groups might be set among the shrubs. The very rampant old Frau Karl Druschki is an effective mass of white, with clumps of the Priors.
Latter and other tall floribundas will settle into bays of a shrub border. The competition of shrub roots and shade is too much for most roses, and precautions must be taken against their encroachment. A barrier of wood, concrete, or metal 2’ feet deep behind the roses will help considerably.
There is a smaller, but no less enthusiastic, group of rose lovers who grow their favorite kinds for a different type of decoration.
The fervent rosarian wants cultural conditions as close to the ideal as possible since he is primarily concerned with the perfection of plant and specimen bloom.
And with testing new varieties, his roses should be in a manageable spot, for experimenting means failures, successes, and little regard for color effects.
Another group thinks that roses are meant for indoor arrangement and is interested mainly in long-stemmed specimens or varieties especially bred for cut flowers in habit, form, color, or fragrance.
Such rose beds also belong to out-of-sight, where plants can be spaced on wider centers than in decorative beds and where their bareness after an orgy of cutting for house, church, or flower show is not too manifest.
44659 by Mary Deputy Cattell