Designing With Roses

"Roses in Mixed Borders" is interesting, but I have always questioned the use of roses in deep borders. Roses are fine in narrow borders where they can easily be sprayed, but only the most carefree roses should be planted in deep borders. I have roses growing in a narrow border which are underplanted with herbaceous flowers. It is easy for me to kneel on a path while I weed under those roses, but I often impale myself on thorns; I can just imagine trying to weed under roses in a deep border. After reading this chapter, my response to roses in deep borders is still "no thank you".

In "Roses for the Wild Garden", Lord is honest about how difficult this kind of garden can be, especially when growing roses. He suggests a number of roses for wild gardens, but the idea doesn't really tempt me. If I had an old orchard, I might be tempted to grow climbing roses into the trees, but as Lord points out, an orchard isn't really a wild garden.

Tony Lord is a great photographer and his photos in this book are stunning. Much of the text is about combining roses with other plants. I found myself skimming through those endless plant combinations, but if I owned this book I would probably find the suggestions useful as I looked up plants in the index to see if they were recommended for combining with roses. If you want to grow roses in your garden, this is a valuable book to own because it is filled with ideas and with practical information about how to implement them.

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