Roses...

Roses at GardenWorks’ Penticton

Roses offer an entire palette of colour and fragrance in your garden. Thanks to the efforts of plant breeders around the world and careful selections of wild and native roses this plant group offers an enormous variety of choices. Gardeners and plant collectors are often beguiled by these showy plants that offer so much in providing season long colour and heavenly fragrance

Maintenance can be as involved as you care to make it. The simplest thing to do is periodically cutting off damaged plant parts should any problem arise and raking up diseased foliage in the fall. More information on pruning can be found in our information sheet on roses, located near the tills in the garden centre.

Traditional rose types are grouped as hybrid teas, grandifloras and floribundas. They are typically grafted onto a rootstock to make them hardier and more productive.

We are carrying more roses, commonly called landscape or shrub roses, grown on their own roots making them hardier to cold and disease. If they do die down they should come back fine the following year. Most of our roses bloom on new wood as well so they will bloom again the year they grow back up.

Most of our grafted roses are fine with a simple mounding of soil around their base for the winter which is easily done in the late fall. Some, such as standard roses, are better protected in the garage for the winter.

Colour.Roses range across the entire colour spectrum though as of yet there is still no true blues or blacks. Blooms can vary from single five petaled blooms, double types with up to 25 petals and even the extremely very full types with more than 40 petals. And don’t forget that foliage colour can differ too as with Rosa rubrifolia and its purplish foliage. The following covers rose colours and examples of each.

Blended colours can be found on Happy Chappy, which is a landscape groundcover type that has lightly scented orange, pink and yellow blooms all at the same time throughout the growing season. It is an amazing sight to see when in full bloom.

More examples of blended colour roses would include: Betty Boop, a yellow edged red Floribunda with a fruity fragrance; Cherry Parfait, a white Grandiflora edged with red; and Double Delight a white and red heavily scented Hybrid Tea; Joseph’s Coat, a climbing rose has richly coloured blooms in a reds and yellows.

Orange is another fresh colour in roses: Brandy is a lightly fragrant Hybrid Tea with golden apricot flowers; Hot Cocoa is a chocolate orange Floribunda with a fruity fragrance; and Morden Glow is a hardy shrub rose that produces clusters of lightly scented orange-red bloooms throughout the season.

Pink roses can be found in many different shades and petal counts. Examples would include Aromatherapy, a heavily scented Hybrid Tea with rich pink blooms; Bonica, a peachy pink lightly fragrant shrub rose; Flower Carpet Pink, a groundcover landscape rose with lightly scented blooms on a vigorous plant; John Davis, a fragrant reblooming hardy shrub rose; Knockout, a newer series of bug resistant roses in various shades of lightly scented pink and reddish blooms; New Dawn, a lightly fragrant pink blossomed climber and Wildberry Breeze, a hardy Rugosa rose with continuous strongly fragrant blooms.

Purplish roses include lavenders and light purples such as: Hansa, an old time hardy Rugosa rose that bears extremely fragrant blooms throughout summer; Lagerfeld, a strongly fragrant Grandiflora type; and Simply Marvelous, a clustered strongly fragrant Floribunda.

Red roses are the colour many people first associate with roses. Examples would include: Beloved, a bright red lightly fragrant Hybrid Tea; Black Cherry, a dark red Floribunda rose with a light but beautiful fragrance; Don Juan, a dark red climber with heavily fragrant blooms; Mister Lincoln, a deep red Hybrid Tea with a heavy fragrance and Veteran’s Honor, a bright red Hybrid Tea named for our veterans that has a light raspberry scent.

White roses show up even in the moonlight and go with all other colours. Examples would include: Blanc Double de Coubert, a heavily scented Rugosa shrub rose; Lace Cascade, a vigorous climber with lightly scented blossoms; and Pope John Paul II, a hybrid tea with the fragrance of citrus blossoms.

Yellow roses are bright and beautiful. Examples include: Apertif, a lightly fragrant Hybrid Tea; Flower Carpet Yellow, another groundcover landscape rose with lightly scented blooms; Midas Touch, a richly musk scented Hybrid Tea; and Sunsprite, a deep yellow rose with blooms scented strongly of licorice.