The Top 50 best roses for cut flowers
The Top 50 best roses for cut flowers
How to choose the very best roses, and how to make them last as cut flowers. PLUS: the monthly round-up, and a tiny bit of gardening Latin
Summer and sunshine will come again. They’ll make us forget about the muddy bits, and we’ll dive into warmth and flowers all over again, gardening like crazy, and feeling good about it
This week, it’s all about roses
We’ve a couple of months to go before they bloom, but you do still have time, up until April1, to plant some bareroot roses. So, inspired by some very exciting news, I’ve picked some favourites for you, which can be enjoyed outside the house as well as in the garden.
Before we get to that, though, here’s our Garden Digestif round-up of everything that happened here on The Gardening Mind last month. If you’re new to TGM, you’ll see you get a lot to browse through at your leisure each month:
The monthly Garden Digestif
We’re having a Zoom get-together for paid subscribers on Sunday March 3rd at 5pm UK time, which is mainly to chat about the Small Garden Design course, which you can join in with at any time. In this Zoom, I’ll also be giving a new subscribers a quick guide as to how to use Substack and how to navigate The Gardening Mind as our community continues to grow so extraordinarily quickly each week. The whole thing shoudn’t last more than 30 minutes. The Zoom invitation is at the end of this post.
We looked at how to choose your Spring bulbs for next year:
We had the most wonderful discussion about ‘Why we garden'. If there’s one post you read this week, read this, together with reader’s comments and memories. It was a magical look at people’s garden memories, and what it means to us to garden:
We looked at how beauty in the garden can be enhanced by thinking about balance:
There was the regular What to do and What Not to do in the garden this month in this post:
IMPORTANT DATE: We’re having a REAL-LIFE get-together for paid subscribers at Water Lane in the summer. There’s a walk-around, a chat, and lunch if you’d like. Details are at the end of this post.
Don’t forget to join Sunday’s regular Show Us Your Plots on Chat . Wherever you are in the world, do show us what your garden is looking like - we’d love to see - and we’re not judgemental! All-comers from everywhere are welcome. On the Chat, this thread will be entitled Sunday March 3rd so that you can find it easily.
Over on the Chat, we’re also having a potato Growalong / Chit-along / Chittachattalong here - do please come and join in - it’s totally silly, and basically involves photos of potatoes sprouting. Yes.
We had a dig-along this week with the BBC presenter, journalist and writer
Leyla Kazim
, who invited us into her gardening world:
I’m working on an index of all contents in The Gardening Mind, by the way. It’s a big one, so bear with me!
I’ve been chatting about the idea of a Fool’s Spring recently
and today, Substack sent me a reminder to repost an article from March 1st 2023, and it seems that things don’t change, yet every year it’s somehow still a surprise when we’re taken by surprise:
Look at these words from here on The Gardening Mind, exactly one year ago:
As usual, Winter got us. We all got excited about the bulbs popping up, and we took off a layer or two of clothing on those sunny days where we could bask in the actual warmth of the sun, an unusual feeling after our hibernation, but a feeling which just feels so right.
And then, all of a sudden, Winter reminded us that it is indeed still winter, and chilly winds quickly knocked the heads of my tiny iris reticulata and showed them who’s boss. The rain came down and the slugs and snails came out; the mud got worse and I came inside again. I’m wondering if anyone has been a bit hardier than me?
It’s one of those tests that are given to garden-lovers, checking that we are really dedicated and reminding us to be flexible. Reminding us that nothing is for certain, but that whenever the reward comes, we should be grateful for it, for it might be taken away from us again in the blink of an eye. The magnolia blooms, the cherry blossoms - let’s enjoy it while we can.
It’s reassuring, isn’t it, this idea that the wheel of the year continues turning, and what we can take from it is the fact that at some point, summer and sunshine will come again? They’ll make us forget about the muddy bits, and we’ll dive into warmth and flowers all over again, gardening like crazy, and feeling good about it.
Talking of Summer and sunshine…
Have you got the new 2024 David Austin Rose Handbook yet?
When I first came to gardening, roses were my first passion. They’d always been a passion but I’d never really known much about them until I planted my first rose, the climber R. Pink Perpétue up on a roof terrace, where not only did it survive, but it flourished. It repeated. It looked pretty in its knicker pinks and it even had a very slight fragrance.
I was hooked, I needed to know more, and so I set about acquiring as many books as I could on the subject. My first acquisition was this David Austin handbook, and my goodness did I love it. It went everywhere with me: breakfast reading through to bedtime reading, in the car, in a bag. It was my bible.
So you can imagine just how long it took me to reply2 when the lovely people at David Austin asked me to create mixed planting ideas for mixed for some of their roses, to feature in their 2024 Handbook.
I am genuinely, honestly and completely blown away by this, and I’m hoping you’ll enjoy the combinations. You can read my Substack post which inspired this rose recipe project here:
You can find also read some more of my rose writing in the links below. Included is the controversial subject of yellow in gardens, which stirred up a bit of a debate over on the Chat. People’s attitude and approach to colour continues to fascinate me3, and I’ll be talking more about colour in the weeks to come.
Onto today’s main topic:
Do you ever cut roses from your garden?
I’ve been planting bare-root roses recently, making space where I know there isn’t any space, but I’m determined, and so I’m liberating the garden of more and more lawn - which is a good thing from many points of view, including biodiversity and maintenance. I do however have a large-ish dog who does like to hang out in and on the grass, particularly the long grass which then become flattened grass, so my dreams of turning the whole area over to wildflowers have yet to be realised. One day.
My rose order this year included R. ‘Ferdinand Pichard’ and R. mundi, having seen some good stripey roses as cut flowers at Daylesford Farm last summer and realising that I had none of these in my own garden.
But here’s the thing: I can never quite bring myself to fully embrace the cutting of roses and bring them in
I look at the roses out in the garden and think just how pretty they’d be inside. I steel myself and go out armed with secateurs and a jug.
But then I pause and think: what will that place look like without the daub of colour that’s currently doing such a good job?
And then I give up. The roses that do make into my house are usually the result of a stem having broken.
I’ve also tried that flower-floating thing, but to my mind it can look a bit hmmmmm. The one place I have seen it look absolutely beautiful is at Daylesford Farm. - you need a lot of roses to achieve this effect:
And here’s the really important thing - the whole point of today’s post:
Every rose I ever have brought in tends to look really sad after a few hours, drooping and losing petals, generally limp with soul destroyed. Do you have this issue? I know that this can sometimes add to the atmosphere of faded glamour in a Dutch still-life kind of a way, but sometimes we want more.
We want the roses to last longer. We NEED them to last longer, to bring inside that colour, texture, fragrance and joy which roses create. Those SUMPTUOUS vases, or single flowers in a tiny bud vase.
So, Gardening Minds, I’ve put together for you 50 of the very best roses to use as cut flowers, as well as tips on how to look after them:
Just imagine bringing these beauties inside: