Creating an Amazing Rose Garden
Creating an Amazing Rose Garden
I’m going to declare that rose-loving is a ‘thing‘ and that I come from a long line of rose-lovers: me, my mother, my mother’s mother and her mother before her…
We always had rose bushes in the garden in South Africa when I was growing up. My mother went so far as to transplant her favourite rose bush when we moved house and planted another in honour of my grandmother when she passed away; a beautiful plant that bears the most spectacular pink blooms – Granny’s favourite!
I wasn’t always a fan, though. As a child I knew them to be the plants that we weren’t allowed to kick the ball near; the thorny bush that, no matter how carefully you tried to manoeuvre past them, a branch would always reach out and snag your t-shirt or shorts leaving a v-shaped hole in your clothes that was beyond impossible to explain away??.
This has been a slow simmer of a love-affair over the years and now I am ready to create my own beautiful rose-garden filled with colourful and fragrant blooms that will attract bees and ladybugs??. Work has begun in earnest…I started with the spot that looked like it used to be a bed before but has subsequently grown over. I managed to get about a third of the bed done this weekend – the entire bed is about 12mX3m (give or take a couple of metres) so there’s a fair bit of ground to be toiled.
Armed with a spade, rake and optimistic determination, I set about clearing the designated patch, as per the plan set out in my Basic Back-Garden Design post, of all grass, weeds, stones and rocks. Much harder work than I initially thought but, after 2 days of toiling, I managed to clear about a third of the space – YAY me! Once I’ve finished digging the soil up I’ll need to go over the ground again. The soil looks to be in good shape but I want to get rid of more of the stones, etc. Once that’s cleared then I can begin preparing the soil by adding some fertiliser and working that in to the soil.
In the meantime, I need to wrap my head around all the different types of roses (who would have thought!) and decide which ones will work best in the allocated area. The rose garden is situated in that part of the garden that gets the most sun (as much sun as you can get in Northern Ireland!) and the soil looks rich and lush (judging by the amount of grass and weeds I pulled out this past weekend I would say it’s VERY fertile soil!
So, I’m thinking of planting climbing roses along the edge nearest to the path – that should close off the view of the shed – and then the fuller rose bushes will fill in the front section of the bed which will give the whole rose garden a layered look. That’s the plan anyway.I want to plant taller roses to the back and then the shrub-like ones to the front of the bed.
I want to stick to pastel colours for the roses because the planned nearby raised flowerbed, which will contain delphiniums, lupins and aubretia, will be filled with vibrant tones of purple so, to soften the garden a little, I thought roses in softer tones of peach, yellow, pink and white would off-set that quite nicely.
I will attempt to make the trellis for the creepers myself (look at me being all Alan Titchmarsh-like). Any recommendations on height, width, material?
Also, I want to plant flowers around the base of the roses to cover their bare stems. I was thinking of planting lavender. Any thoughts on whether or not this is a good idea or any alternative suggestions would be greatly appreciated?
As previously stated, I have no experience with gardening. In fact, you could fit my knowledge of gardening on a post-it note and still have room to add a shopping list but I do know that roses are fairly hardy plants and they like the sunshine…yes, that’s about it. So for now I will entertain myself by completing the preparation of the bed before moving on to the fertilisation and planting phase…you know, the real gardening?
HAPPY GARDENING! ??