watering

A simple month by month guide which can be used as a handy reference tool throughout the year to ensure that your roses will always look their best. JANUARY By the end of the month you should aim to have completed your annual staggered pruning of established Climbers and Ramblers that flower on current seasons wood (Group One). For a guide on how to prune these roses please click here.January is also a good time to plan your summer garden, so ensure you have the most up-to-date catalogues to help inspire you. FEBRUARY Pruning, pruning and more pruning! All established bush and repeat flowering shrubs should receive their annual prune this month. As a general rule bush roses should be reduced down to approximately 5 to 7 buds from the base of the plant and shrub roses should be thinned out, reducing younger stems by a third and older stems cut

Feeding Roses Roses are very hungry plants and should therefore be fed regularly throughout their lives to ensure maximum blooms and growth, from first year plants through to 50 year old ramblers. We recommend a good feed of a nitrogen high feed like “Top Rose Gold” after the late-winter prune in February, then feeding every two weeks throughout the flowering period with a high potash feed like “Tomorite” or "Uncle Tom's Rose Tonic". This photo shows just how

Whilst many people think of June as being the month for roses, September can actually be almost as productive. This is the time that the majority of repeat flowering varieties will produce their second flush of flowers, bringing your garden back to life with a riot of colour in late summer. Flowers produced later in the season can often be stronger and more vibrant in colour than they were in early summer as well, adding further to the enjoyment of the second flush from repeat flowering roses. This is because flowers produced in June can become slightly bleached by the intensity of the scorching mid-summer sun, whereas come September the days and nights have started to become a little cooler, therefore allowing your roses to produce their flowers with more vivid, truer colours. Although your roses will most likely produce slightly fewer flowers for the second flush than they did early in the season. To achieve the best results, simply deadhead your roses as soon as they

Whether you are completely new to roses or have been growing them for years, pruning them can seem like a bit of a daunting task, but it needn’t be. The first thing I would really like to stress is that no matter how bad a job you make of pruning your roses, you are not going to kill them! As the old gardener’s saying ‘Get your worst enemy to prune your roses’ suggests, roses are tough and can take a lot more abuse than people give them credit for. Just think about how badly butchered hedgerows look along the roadside after the farmer has hacked them back. It’s easy to look at them, resembling nothing more than bare broken and splintered sticks and wonder how these poor roses and hawthorns will ever survive, but they do. A trial was conducted several years ago at the Gardens of the Rose, St Albans, where some of their roses