Coming up Roses

Well, hardly anyone could be bothered to comment on yesterday's post, and I must admit it was a bit of a cheaters post. So here is something of my own and I hope you are all impressed and comment, especially as I am posting from Rambling Woman's kitchen. And I used my new prize camera which arrived last week, and which is fantastic.

When I started gardening, I wouldn't have imagined choosing to grow roses. The roses themselves can be lovely but I associated roses with awkward ugly sharp unyielding stems or unnautural looking standards, fixed and regimented. Municipal flower beds. Vicious pruning.

The very old roses in my first garden in Durham converted me with their lovely natural form, soft green foliage and wonderfully sweet heady perfume.

I have 9 different roses in my garden now, with a 10th which just arrived on my birthday and not yet planted.
Some are very old varieties, some are David Austen roses - bred from ancient plants but continuously flowering and disease resistant, unlike some of the older ones - and some are more modern roses but chosen according to my fussy criteria. No hybrid tea roses for me. (Nor blue roses. NEVER).

Most of them are deliciously scented, all are beautiful as plants, not just sticks which produce flowers, some are single, simple and elegant, some are blowsy and ruffled. Their scent depends on the weather, their colour changes with their age and I love having fragrant bunches of them sprawling untidily or arching gracefully in the house.

So here are the first to flower in my garden this year:


Mme Alfred Carriere

This is a fairly old rose with a soft, full pom-pom type of flower, covered with flowers at the moment. Almost - pale pink, sometimes looks slightly buff/golden too. Gorgeous scent, its climbing and trying to escape in the wind, I must go and tie it back a bit.















Golden Showers - this is a twentieth century climbing rose which I had to move from a large tub outside my back door, because it wasn't getting enough sun.

Its doing better now. Not a lot of scent, but it flowers very generously, pretty yellow/gold flowers, with beautifully shaped buds.









Kazanluk - This is an ancient variety of rose which is used for the production of rose oil. It only flowers once, in the Spring, but is worth the wait not only for the pretty ruffled flowers but particularly for the exquisitely sweet scent.



Napoleon's Josephine commissioned her own spies to smuggle particular varieties of rose from England during the Napoleonic wars - I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I can understand people developing a passion for them.