At a certain point in my gardening career I was looking for a plant that would have a show of bloom through most of the season. The answer was right under my nose: roses! We somehow catalog roses as simply a flower that performs in June, but roses are much more… they are landscape worthy shrubs, they are sources of fragrance and beauty, They grow vertically or can cover the ground, they are icons and symbols… they grace our tables and garland our minds.
The rose flowers are premier cut flowers.
Roses are one of the most useful of flowering shrubs and one of the most loved of all blooms; they are rightly labeled “Queen of Flowers”. They perform very well in most gardens, and with the right choices can be grown well with a minimum of know-how.
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How To Grow
These are not the easiest choice to grow well. Subject to plant diseases and insect pests, heavy feeders, and sometimes of questionable hardiness, a certain degree of skill and knowledge is required for a beautiful rose bloom on a healthy plant. But luckily for gardeners, the breeders have attended to producing plants of much greater healthy resistance to those disabilities. 
The Thérèse Bugnet Rose
A “Look Into” Garden Choosing some of the more recently bred shrub roses will give a landscape great beauty without so much of the work
Still, attention should be paid to these cultivation tips:
- Grow roses in at least 6 hours of sun, preferably more
- Feed regularly, but stop 2 months before the first frost (to allow for winter dormancy)
- Prune after leaves appear, after bloom, and at the end of the season
- Water deeply, but infrequently, and don’t splash the leaves.
A Short History of Garden Roses
Roses have yielded fragrance, medicine, and flavoring since ancient times, so it is no wonder they have been imbued with symbolic meaning. The rose is revered as a symbol of love.
In history, rose petals graced Roman banquets as confetti and carpeting. The attar of roses, otherwise known as ‘otto of rose’ or rose oil, is the perfume distilled from Rosa centifolia or Rosa damascena. The Persian Avicenna, in the tenth century, perfected the distillation process, and today it is Bulgaria which produces most of the world’s rose attar.
Picking roses
In more modern times, Josephine Bonaparte’s garden at the Château de Malmaison became well known for its collection of roses. They were immortalized by the famous Redouté botanical illustrations.
From species roses discovered in the Age of Exploration, the modern roses have been hybridized into innumerable variations, some with fragrance and some without that quality in the quest for ever larger blossoms and longer periods of bloom. Newer cultivars are again bred with the perfume as an important feature, thankfully. In fact, there has been a resurgence of the old roses, with new introductions which embody many of the heritage characteristics of many petals, form, fragrance, and plant health.
Rose Photos
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- Therese Bugnet rose
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- Old Roses: New Dawn
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- Alchymist Rose
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- Therese Bugnet
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- Reine de Violettes
Belinda is an old fashioned rose
