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Rose Garden Structures

© Mark Whitelaw

Landscape design employs four principles: form, texture, color, and line. More recently, density and mass have been added to the list as designers defined what gave smaller landscapes the same feel and interest of the larger, more spacious designs of the last century.

The modern implementation of these six principles is often achieved using structure or "landscape bones" - called "hardscape." This hardscape not only develops these landscape principles, it enhances the visual scene by creating contrast while providing continuity within the garden as it is viewed from different settings. In short, it solidifies the garden's central theme.

Hardscape can take any manner of structure - from boulders, to statuary, to lanterns, to birdbaths, to any number of available man-made or natural creations. I have seen old porcelain bathtubs, rusty bed frames, and even old shoes used to provide hardscape.

It also serves as a functional support to display our various landscape plantings (our "softscape"). It is particularly useful when training and displaying climbing roses. Unlike vines, which can attach themselves to most anything, climbing roses need a support to train and display them.

For roses, this type of hardscape comes in three basic landscape forms: 1) vertical - pillars and their cousins, the teepees and parasols; 2) horizontal - trellises and their relatives, the screens, fences and walls; and 3) a combination of vertical and horizontal - arches and their kin, the arbors, pergolas and swags.

The use of pillars or columns to support roses (called "pillaring") can be traced back to centuries long past. A pillar is a central post around which the rose's canes are loosely coiled. By coiling the canes, they are made more horizontal than if trained vertically by running up the sides of the column. This technique creates more bud breaks, more new growth, and hence more blooms.

In the 1902 design classic, Roses for English Gardens, Gertrude Jekyll writes,

A perspective of Rose pillars is a charming feature in a garden, and one of the ways in which their beauty may be best enjoyed. They should be so placed that one can go right up to them and see the Roses at eye level and below it and also against the sky, and smell their sweet scent in perfect comfort as they grow.

An adaptation of the pillar is the teepee, a combination of three or four pillars joined at the top to form a pyramidal shape. Teepees are an effective way to train different rose varieties of complementary colors into one garden form. As Ms. Jekyll so eloquently described,

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