Roses

Today it is snowing and they are promising us at least more rain, if not more snow.  I should not complain since I have spent so much of my time in France praying for rain, but the wet weather is beginning to be a bit of a bore. It also tempts me to make some sarcastic remarks about global warming, only I know that the 'fundamentalists' amongst you will riposte that bad weather is also evidence of this phenomenon. Donc, we agnostics cannot win.  Meanwhile it may be a good moment before one is overwhelmed by the onrush of Spring, to think about roses.  Fortunately I am extremely fond of them, I say fortunately because if there is one plant that does like our often heavy clay it is the rose. Not all of them in fact. For what it is worth I have found that the rugosas do not do well here, in particular they are prone to constant die back. This has always worried me since they are supposed to cope with anything, and moreover they contain one of my favourite roses, the wonderfully scented Roserie de l'Hay. The conclusion that I have arrived at is that while they cope happily with poor soil, what they do not like is too rich, or in winter too damp a soil. And while on the subject of disappointments, two roses that grew very well for me in England, Nevada, covered early in the year in large single white, sometimes touched with pink,flowers, and its sister, Marguerite Hilling, have not performed down here, I guess for the same reasons that the rugosas have not. If one can produce good drainage perhaps the problem would disappear. Still for the most part the problem is not under-performance, but an embarras de richesses. I am of the generation that has grown up with the revival of what I will call the old-fashioned rose, or in French Les roses anciennes, which somehow sounds better.  It was a reaction against the perhaps over-colourful and over-artificial hybrid tea rose - how many of you remember Super Star? - a reaction led by people like Graham Stuart Thomas and Vita Sackville West. One of the most important moments in my life was my first visit to Sissinghurrst, just a year or two before Vita Sackville West died. I was overcome by many aspects of that marvellous garden, and on subsequent visits have never been disappointed, but of course one of its great features are the old-fashioned roses. Two roses that I first saw then, Complicata, in fact a once flowering single deep pink, and Fantin Latour, for me the quintessential old-fashioned rose, have been in every garden that I have ever been associated with.

But that visit to Sissinghurst was over forty years ago, and old-fashioned roses are not only old-fashioned but old hat. They also have obvious disadvantages. Many are prone to disease, especially blackspot. Many of them are only once-flowering, a criticism which is a little bit hard, since most shrubs are only once-flowering, but since many roses can be almost continuously in flower outside the winter months,one may field with those that do not that one is being sold a bit short. One of the developments in say the last twenty years has been precisely to overcome this criticism by producing roses that are in the style of the old-fashioned, but which repeat flower, and are also by and large healthy. The man who has been responsible for all this is of course David Austin, and his English Roses are now to be discovered wherever roses are to be found, and very much in France. Moreover the French breeders, of which there are many distinguished ones, have followed his example; I am thinking of Guillot's Generosa and Meilland's Romantica series.  I for instance have fallen for Meilland's Alain Suchon, largely because I am a great fan of the French singer, but in theory it is lovely deep red, very smelly rose rather in the style of Austin's William Shakespeare, which incidentally is one of roses that is not free of blackspot.

David Austin roses are almost certainly deserve a blog to themselves, so popular are they, and for the most part rightly so.  In fact so many new ones appear each year that it is very difficult to keep up with them, so that my favourites such as Heritage and Mary Rose date from twenty years ago. Slightly more recent, and one that I had doubts about because I was not quite sure of the colour. It name, Molineux, after a football ground, is a bit of a worry to start with, and colour, which changes from yellow through to apricot according to the weather, is almost fluorescent. But so healthy is it, and so continuously in flower, with good scent, and finally so cheerful is the colour, that it has won me over. A very new one that I have got my eye on is Munstead Wood. In this case with its reference to the great Gertrude Jekyll, the names pleases as does the colour, a deep velvety crimson according to the catalogue, the rose colour I particularly like. I just hope that it has got enough red in it to avoid the burning that roses with a lot of purple in them tend to suffer from in our climate. One of my absolute favourites, Souvenir du Dr Jamain, suffers from this problem, and finding the right balance of sunshine and shade to overcome it is very difficult.

There have been plenty of other developments in the last forty years, including patio roses, and groundcover roses, these always a worry for me, since prickly groundcover does not seem a good idea, but my own development has been towards the so-called wild, or species roses. They are usually only once flowering, and the flowers are single, that is to say normally just five petals. Of course the best known of these is the Dog rose, but in fact there are many others from all parts of the world. What I like about them, apart from their simplicity is their all the year round intere"st, which includes hips, and less often, but not uncommonly, very good autumn colour - Rosa virgiiana would be a very good example. Still a fuller discussion of these, and many other roses no doubt, will have to wait for another occasion