Rose Gardens - Part 1 - History

The 18th Century continued the tradition of grand formal gardens, the English landscape gardens of the 18th Century opposed the grand tradition, but there even less of a place for roses in these new landscape compositions than in the grand parterres. There was little place for roses in grand gardens for 200 years, this is why old roses are mainly thought of as cottage garden flowers.

While there may have been monastic rose gardens, the modern rose garden is a product of the 19th century. The segregation of roses in their own garden is very characteristic of the scientific approach to botany that developed during the 18th Century, the same point of view resulted in the creation of pinetums (arboretums in which collections of conifers were planted).

One of the most famous of rose gardens was created at Malmaison for the Empress Josephine between 1796 and 1814. It is often said that the reason why rose gardens weren't popular before the 19th Century is because most old roses only bloom once, in late spring and early summer, but this garden mainly contained old roses. It was a collection of all the known species and varieties of roses which were known at the time. It did include some of the new roses which bloomed more than once, but even if re-blooming roses hadn't been introduced to Europe, rose gardens would probably have been popular features in 19th Century gardens. Rose gardens are almost always romantic and the combination of romance and science was perfectly suited to the century.

In the late 18th Century, re-blooming roses were introduced into Europe from China, they were hybridized with roses which had been grown in European gardens and the resulting re-blooming hybrids were so popular that the old roses were almost forgotten by most gardeners. These new re-blooming hybrids were often used as bedding plants in formal rose gardens, the most common designs for these gardens are cutwork parterres.

By the late 19th Century, old roses were being rediscovered, the garden writer and designer Gertrude Jekyll was one of the people most responsible for this revival of interest. The rose garden which Vita Sackville-West created at Sissinghurst between 1932 and her death in 1962 was very influenced by Gertrude Jekyll, it combines the lines of a formal garden with a billowing, unstructured planting of roses. This approach to planting a rose garden has remained very popular,

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