Home » Plants & Animals » Virtual Gardening » Better than a Moat and Drawbridge: Old Garden Roses

Better than a Moat and Drawbridge: Old Garden Roses

© Carol Wallace

The apartment complex in my backyard has been a decided nuisance. Before we started the garden, tenants used our yard to walk their dogs, play catch, and practice a little arson on the barn. When the barn burned down we built a garden in the old stone foundation. It began as a few shrub roses and a couple packets of seeds. But soon it grew and extended out from the barn and along the back property line. We added a small pond stocked with fish. I rather hoped that the very personal character of the garden would clue people in: Private Property!!

Not a chance. Now they took Sunday strolls through the yard, picking my flowers. The apartment children went fishing for goldfish and left the pond stocked with apples plucked from our trees. They built a treehouse in our nicest sycamore when we were on vacation. Then I declared war.

There is a line of pines along the property line, which was supposed to function as a property line marker and as a barrier. Every Christmas several of them magically become indoor Christmas trees. My mission was to find a barrier unsuitable as a Christmas decoration,that would grow quickly and form an impenetrable hedge.

As luck would have it, a catalog from Heirloom Old Garden Roses. Since I can't resist a plant catalog, even for plants I don't grow, I read it, cover to cover. To my amazement I found roses that would grow 8 feet tall and equally wide without a fence. To my glee, I found that some of these giants also had large, sharp thorns. I quickly calculated that about 10 of these would cover the most heavily trespassed section of our property in a short three years.

I hesitated at first. Most old garden roses, and all of the large ones that I found, bloomed but once a year. The shrub roses in our ruins bloomed all summer. But I reasoned that peonies, lilies and most other garden favorites have only a short bloom season, and we never begrudge them that. Why should I ask more of a rose? Plus, that one short season of bloom is truly glorious, far surpassing the more sparse display of the everbloomers. A look at a few gardens featuring old garden roses clinched it. After amassing several more rose catalogs, and doing some size and comparison shopping, I ordered.

What I received frightened me. Some of the "rosebushes" had root systems small I could dig an adequate hole with a teaspoon. However -- they were allthe rose plants I had, so I took my teaspoon and dug away.

The copyright of the article Better than a Moat and Drawbridge: Old Garden Roses in Virtual Gardening is owned by . Permission to republish Better than a Moat and Drawbridge: Old Garden Roses in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.