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Landscaping with Species Roses - Part 1

© Mark Whitelaw

Landscaping with roses can be a challenge, and choosing the right rose for the right purpose and the right location is important to the success of your landscape design. Roses often overlooked for landscape use are the Species or "wild" roses and their more recent hybrids.

As a generalization, Species roses bloom in pale colors - usually white, blush pink, medium pink and yellow. A few, however, bloom in the deeper shades of yellow, red, crimson and purple. All of the yellows originated from Asia while the reds were originally native only to China. Remontant roses, those that repeat their bloom through the same growing season, were exclusively from the eastern periphery of Asia.

Although indigenous to almost every corner of the globe, botanists like to "pigeon hole" plants into categories or groups, and Species roses are no different. There are 12 botanical rose groupings which distinguish roses by their physical and genetic characteristics. For the sake of consistency, we'll look at the various roses from the point of these groupings.  Becoming familiar with  these characteristics can assist you in determining which rose may be best suited for your garden landscape, your local growing conditions, and your intended uses for the rose.

Let's look briefly at each of these rose groups and some of their descendants.

Pimpinellifoliae

So called because their foliage is reminiscent of the pimpinella or salad burnet, this group is native to central Europe and northern Asia. There are at least 12 species in this group, and it is from Pimpinellifoliae that we have most of our yellow roses. Several creams, pinks, and whites can also be found, however. As a group, their growth varies in height from 3 - 12 ft. (1 - 4 m), and their blooms are single, profuse and born on short, very prickly stems. As a rule, these roses are once-blooming, although some hybrids can produce a second flush where growing seasons are long.

Popular landscape roses include R. foetida and R. f. persiana ('Austrian Yellow') because it is reportedly from these roses that all of our modern yellow roses came, and R. foetida bicolor ('Austrian Copper') because of its dazzling copper-orange blooms. The latter  sometimes reverts to its yellow parent, and both yellow and copper blooms can be found on the same shrub. Another rose in this group worth mentioning is R. omeiensis, the only four-petalled rose.

Modern rose groupings are the Austrian Briars, Burnet and Scotch Roses.

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