June, on a warm, sunny day, is all promise, clear blue sky and overflowing optimism. The feeling that - despite all the news in the media - the world is a beautiful, perfect place. At the moment, the one rose bush I have is a bower of flowers, the plant smothered in them, with hundreds of buds promising even more joy to come. It's "Gertrude Jekyll", an English Rose by breeder David Austin, with vivid deep-pink blooms which always look as if they'd overflow with those neatly folded silky petals. As if those cup-shaped flowers couldn't hold all the smooth and fragrant silkiness, so eventually they turn into a layered tutu rather than a cup.
 |  |  |
In early spring I trained the back half of the bush along one of those horrid garden fences you see in every big garden centre: wooden panels in glowing orange, held in place by concrete posts. The fence was here before us and thankfully has weathered to an unobtrusive if somewhat dull grey, but still... Now the rose does its utmost best to cover and disguise it. That's the beauty with roses: if you train the main shoots horizontally, you'll increase the number of blooms immensely. Because, if before you could expect a number of flowers at the tip of the shoot come June, if you tie it horizontally to say a framework of wires, every node (that is the slightly knobbly bit where leaves are attached) will burst a new, short shoot with buds at the end. Brilliant, really!
 Many of the rose's flowering shoots on lower "levels" lean over |  You can see the horizontally trained main shoot and the short flowering shoots growing from it |
Anyway, Gertrude Jekyll does not just look like straight from an illustration for Sleeping Beauty, it also has the most amazing perfume: real olde-English-rose perfume, straight from the bottle, so to speak. But despite the air being still and the plant having a sunny and very sheltered inner-London spot, you have to come within a metre or two of the blooms to smell it - something I'm a teeny bit disappointed about as I had hoped it would perfume the entire garden or even the bedroom above on a balmy summer's night. Never mind.
Oh, and I found that Clematis texensis 'Princess Diana' looks very good with it: its colour is just a shade deeper and (here at least) it tends to flower at the same time. Also, their shape - small, graceful goblets - complements the big rose blooms very well. I cut it back every year in late winter (say, February) to about 20 - 40 cm above ground and it grows again from there. Mind you, slugs and snails love the new shoots, so in spring I quite often find the latter munched to within an inch of their life. But so far, the plant always has produced new shoots from the base. And at some stage the snails seem to find something else more attractive and leave the clematis alone. Phew.
"Princess Diana" mingling with "Gertrude Jekyll"
While my rose grows in a proper if narrow flowerbed, the clematis' home is a container. I used John Innes No. 2 and 3 compost, mixed with a little multipurpose compost perhaps, and it has been happy there for several years now. Both roses and clematis have a deep root run, so if you want to keep them in pots or any other container, make sure it is tall rather than wide. (Tall AND wide, of course, would be even better...) And since roses love heavy, nutritious soil I'd then go for John Innes No. 3 straight.
I thought I'd write about that other great fragrance in my garden right now, too. But I think I'll leave the pinks for another post.
I thought I'd write about that other great fragrance in my garden right now, too. But I think I'll leave the pinks for another post.
RSS Feed