Landscaping with Roses

I prefer to keep roses in a section of the garden all their own rather than scattering them around.  If you grow roses in a wide array of colors to enjoy their blooms indoors, think about giving the bushes their own space, maybe just a cutting section within your garden, where their hues and shades won't compete with whatever is nearby.  However, if you have an empty trellis, arbor, fence, pergola, or if you want a hedge or border plantings, that's another matter, and you should sprinkle roses liberally throughout your landscape.

Besides those already mentioned, many climbing and pillar roses are fine for landscaping as long as you remember their colors when you plant them.  When ramblers are in full bloom (and they usually blossom in flushes all at once), they make bold garden statements.  Make sure that their vivid colors complement your other plantings.

When you plant a hedge or a border of ground-huggers, you have the best of two worlds since you can cut for the house and leave color on the bushes.  I strongly urge you to plant only one variety, or at least only one color, in a row.  Mixed colors look like a mishmash.

Sometimes one large rosebush makes an attractive landscape accent.  Or you may want to hide something such as a utility meter or a water spigot.  Besides giving thought to complementary colors, decide how tall or wide the bushes will have to get (remember also that roses go dormant and will expose your eyesore for a while).  Varieties such as Queen Elizabeth grow to be exceptionally tall, and some more modern shrub varieties can grow into bushes the size of a small car, particularly the "parkroses" from Kordes of West Germany.

The prettiest rosebushes I've seen in a landscape form a color-coordinated row of standards planted along a winding walkway to the front porch of a stately home.  Their proprietor, a man who swears he always knew that the rose would eventually become America's national flower, chose his favorite red, pink, and white All-America Rose Selections and had them budded as tree roses.  A thick, spongy lawn grows to within a one-foot circle of the base of each plant and everything is as neat as a pin.

However much those of us who prefer modern roses hate admitting it, old garden roses are better for landscaping, especially if you have something too large for even the most rambunctious of modern hybrids to camouflage.  If the outside of a shred is irrevocably ugly, but it harbors a useful interior, plant a house-eating old rose to gobble it up.  Or if you buy an old home with an abandoned outhouse that you don't feel like moving, cover it with Gold of Ophir, the favorite rose of M.F.K. Fisher's childhood.  Keep in mind that most older varieties have only one bloom.  True, it's long and profuse, but that's it.  Even so, foliage remains throughout most of the year, dropping only at pruning time, when even old roses go dormant.