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Peter Beales is one of the world's leading experts on roses, with an especial interest in old roses. He has written several books on the subject and has recently completed a lecture of New Zealand with the Heritage Rose Society. We were lucky enough to catch his Wellington lecture.
Peter began telling us of the wonderful day he had spent at looking at New Zealand roses, and his renewed amazement at the size of rose plants in here. The dimensions in his books are frequently exceeded in New Zealand, where roses have a longer growing season and grow more robustly than in the UK. |
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Souvenir de Mme Leonie Viennot
Found and restored to commerce from New Zealand |
'Buff Beauty'
For a summer-long flowering season
Rosa sericea pteracantha (left)
For amazing, translucent thorns amidst ferny foliage | |
He also told how gardening writers and especially influential Sunday paper columnists, were advising readers to 'rip out their roses for they create too much work for such a short season of flower'. Irises, if the columnists were to be believed, were better value. This set the theme for much of the evening, and Peter worked the value of roses in your garden into his lecture on 'Roses in the Landscape' and he demonstrated with his many, lovely slides that not only are roses irresistibly beautiful but they have a log season of flowering and many have other garden virtues as well, bringing foliage interest, hips or berries and autumn colour as well. |
'Gruss an Aachen'
Compact, fragrant and long flowering -
ideal for the smaller garden |
We were treated to the sight of roses growing in all situations and climates. We were encouraged to grow taller shrub roses as climbers (forget about bare-legged climbers, train a shrub rose up your walls instead), to let our roses have their head (don't prune them unless the wood is dead, the plant is sick, or it 'asks' to be pruned), and even to let rambler roses grow as a shrub.
Tales of 'finding' and 'rescuing' roses were told, as were the challenges of designing a rose garden in a hot, dry Mediterranean site where previously cacti and succulents had grown.
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The audience, being drawn from the Heritage Rose Society, were already coverts in the main but anyone who had doubted that there was room in today's garden for a old-style or heritage or rose would have been convinced by the end of the evening. The notebooks were out and the printed list of slides was heavily annotated by most of the audience.
 Peter Beales recently revised and updated edition of 'Classic Roses' is an essential reference for anyone interested in growing shrub or heritage roses.
See our review and order now from Flying Pig . |
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