Some more stuff from Lloyd.

Christopher Lloyd, The Adventurous Gardener. Published by Penguin Books. 1987 edition.
Page 90.


Roses Take Their Place.

What place, I often ask myself, should roses take in our gardens? A silly question, really, because each of us has to make up his mind about it for himself and each will reach a different conclusion, right for him, wrong for his neighbour.
    Let me be a little more aggressive. It is not a fact that roses are much over planted and feature too prominently in the majority of gardens? Even in June-July, when at the height of their glory, I think as I look at the endless succession of front gardens that line our roadsides what a horrible jarring jumble of strong colours they comprise. True, they don't have to be a jarring jungle when selected and arranged by someone with an eye for what goes with what. But still, when the flowers have gone, you're left with singularly unlovely shrubs occupying the most prominent positions.
    A garden can be, by careful mixed planting, be made to absorb a certain number of non-cooperating shrubs such as these, but not too many. It is a question of getting your proportions right. If we can train ourselves to make our roses take their place among other kinds of shrubs and with herbaceous plants, with lilies and alliums and certain other bulbs, and a few clematis, then we shall enjoy their contribution far more but we shall not be able to grow so many of them.
    There must surely be some roses that you're growing now but could do very well without. Better, in fact. What about those muscular modern hybrid tea rose bushes, for instance, with their great thick stems, huge thorns and course foliage. You must have their blooms for cutting; did I hear you say? But really, you know, they don't look much less stiff or more enduring when you've arranged them in the house. A bunch of stocks or pinks would look far more relaxed and be a great deal freer with their scent.
   The floribundas, then? You haven't the time for annual bedding and they take its place. What a pity. Because actually the notion that roses are labour-saving is a complete fallacy. I don't hold it against any plant that it makes work if it is worth it in other ways, but to pretend that it doesn't make work is another matter. I won't run through different kinds of attention that roses demand, here, but having seen to their needs, beds of floribundas are very inflexible. There they are, making the same display year after year with only their blossoms to recommend them. Now, bedding out ( as I have indicated in another chapter) gives you endless scope for change and experiment at least twice a year; three times if you're enterprising.
    If a permeant planting is de rigueur, you could include shapely and harmonious ingredients like junipers and cistuses, santolinas and yuccas (for contrast), that give pleasure for most of the time and among which a few roses would contribute with their own special ebullience in their season without hogging it all the time.
    Some gardeners, while reviling the H T and floribunda rose, go all out for the old shrub roses and themselves get bogged down. I grant their appeal; flower colour, shape and scent all work together. Colours may be bright, but there is never the crude admixture of yellow and geranium red in them that we find (a) since Pernet-Ducher introduced the blood of the bright yellow Austrian briar, Rose foetida, into the old roses, and (b) since the post-war mutation which introduced pure red geranium pigment into our roses and all the hot colours that have ensued.
    But the old shrub roses are exacting plants. They demand a deal of careful management. I remember being shown a garden devoted to this type of rose which its owner, clearly dissatisfied, as well she might have been, exclaimed that she was never again going to allow other plants among and under her roses (there were a few spindly nigellas, with an under-the-axe look about them). One has to do things for the roses, she remarked, implying that any competition was a threat to their well-being. And yet there were acres (they felt like acres, anyway) of unappetising ground among the shrubs, many of which were looking wretched, as though longing for a package holiday on the Costa Brava.
    If only, I thought for the umpteenth time, if only roses can be absorbed into our gardening, then the dog can wag its tail once more and a proper balance is restored.
    John Treasure manages then beautifully in his garden at Burford House (in the Teme Valley on the Shropshire/Worcestershire border). In the first place he knows how to prune and train them, and most need a good deal of this every year. He keeps those that inclined to make long, leggy shoots down to 3 1/2 ft at flowering time so that they are fully furnished with leaves and blossoms right to the ground. A triangle of stout chestnut spiles forms a 3 1/2-ft tall framework round a bush like the gallicas 'Duc de Guiche' and 'Hippolyte' of the bright pink damask 'Ispahan'. To this the roses' new canes are trained in a spiral, being tied in individually to a post only as often as is necessary to keep them in position. The posts and string, I may add, are of muted natural colouring, so that you only see them if you are looking for the mechanics of the job.
    Pftizer's junipers, of oblique rather than prostrate habit, are used a good deal among or in front of the roses, and I especially noticed and liked (when on a June visit) the way his 'Duc de Guiche', which has flat, double carmine flowers with an open greenish centre, had one of its canes straying 'naturally' forwards into a juniper, whereas the rest were secured behind and at a higher level to their chestnut supports.
    These mixed borders with their accent on old roses were very wide, which gives elbow room for large specimens and allows considerable planting choice. At the back a 10-ft Rosa rubrifolia has a splendidly vigorous R, turkestanica (chinensis mutabilis) to one side. It is 6 ft tall and not a bit leggy, and anyway you wouldn't have seen its legs because a group in front of the 3-ft herbaceous perennial Baptisia australis, with indigo blue, lupin-like spikes of clean colouring and outline. 'Duc de Guiche' was by the side of this and then, in front the juniper with a summer-flowering clematis threading through it. You can cut this type hard back almost to ground level annually, without an embarrassment to its supporting neighbours.
    In front of Rosa damascene 'Rose de Resht' -- bright carmine, very double and flat -- and the deep crimson 'Souvenir d'Alphonse Lavallee', which is of semi-sprawling habit but in need of no support, there were plantings to give later interest of Iris pallida 'Argenteo-variegata', an Agapanthus campanulatus cv., and a pleasing perennial labiate that I once grew from Thompson & Morgan seed, Scutellaria canescens. It has 3-ft spikes of soft greyish-blue flowers.
    Cistuses are not unlike roses and I liked the juxtaposition of Cistus x purpureus, which is rosy magenta, 3 1/2 ft high, with Rosa centifolia 'De Meux', whose tiny, absolutely formal, flat double flower are only 2 in. across. They are whorled in the centre, thanks to their superabundance of petals. This is a weakfish grower, only 3 ft high. With behind it, in delightful contrast, Buddleia alternifolia 'Argentia'. so much prettier and a little less vigorous than the type-plant with plain green leaves. Silver shoots and wands of lavender blossom, at its best in June.
    Another good grouping combined the white flowers (pink in bud) of Cistus x corbariensis against a white York rose, Rosa alba, which has glaucous foliage; a stooled plant of Eucalyptus gunnii. bearing its rounded glaucous, juvenile foliage only, a huge mound behind of the purple-leaved form of Cotinus coggygria, the Venetian sumach, and an enviably large specimen of the glaucous Berberis temolaica to one side. Only a foreground apron of heathers seemed a bit of a wasted opportunity.
   With all their free-and-easy appearance, these roses at Burford House are carefully pruned and trained annually and repeatedly sprayed against fungal diseases in the growing season. The old roses need this attention just as much as modern varieties do.
    Another garden where the owners, the Allan Camerons, love roses but let them take their place with other garden flowers is at Allangrange on the Black Isle near Inverness. The mauve panicles of Campanula latifolia look well with every kind of large-growing rose, in this case in front of the soft pink Rosa alba 'Celestial'. White rugosas made a pleasing background to this same campanula, to blue delphiniums and the uncompromising scarlet Lychnis chalcedonica. It is always worth finding the right place for this.
    White (and grey) delphiniums look good with white roses, there being such a contrast in form. Here it was the vigorous double shrub rose 'Mme Hardy' behind the modern single-flowered 'White Wings' in front. I'm very fond of 'White Wings', and its purple stamens make a special feature of the flower centre, but alas that it should make such a miserable stalky plant.
    The single white Rosa x paulii is so overwhelmingly vigorous that it needs a great deal of space. Allangrange it billows in front of Hydrangea petiolaris, growing up an old tree, and there were white foxgloves all around.
    Sissinghurst Castle gardens are especially famed for their roses, but so well are they absorbed into and digested by their surroundings that when someone recently referred to their rose garden, I said, 'Where's that?' It hadn't occurred to me that the roses were thicker on the ground in one place than in another, and there is so much else of interest growing around and near them that you never get that terrible feeling, familiar to old-rose nuts, that after the middle of July the year is over.
    There's no part of my garden where roses are excluded either. We do also have a rose garden. It was designed and planted before the First World War and it is hard to think of it in any other role. But roses are a varied lot and of every age up to sixty years. And I allow other plants to interlope: violets, hyacinths, teazels, and the purple-leaved, yellow-flowered Oxalis corniculata 'Purpurea'. The tall, stemmy, purple-flowered Verbina bonariensis has introduced itself and is a happy ingredient, and around the margins where weedkillers don't reach there is a pink-and-white balsam that would take the whole place over given half a chance. Tom Wright, in his book on the gardens of Kent, Sussex and Surrey (in Batsford's Gradens of Britain series), kindly describes this as 'probably the most successful rose garden of those mentioned in this book'. Any dedicated rosarian would strenuously disagree, and I cannot win prizes from it even in our local flower show. But, within a firm, well-designed framework, it is a happy community.
    It is true, as I said at the start, that if you treat the rose as just one among many desirable garden flowers, and if you allow it to take its place with the rest, you won't have room to grow as many as if you made of them a speciality. That should be no loss, considering the range of plants that beckons to us and insists that they have comparable charms on our favours. And it is certain that our practices in the art of gardening will be greatly enriched when the rose is considered as a companion for other plants rather than as an isolate.