The new Climbing Roses .... Six on Saturday

Following on from building the pergolas and summerhouse late last year (see posts passim), over the winter and early spring we've sourced and planted the new climbing roses.

And since there just happens to be six of them, I thought I'd use the opportunity to join in with the Six on Saturday brigade for the first time, a theme hosted every week by The Propagator and which is one of the gardening blogs I read regularly. The SoS links are the source of much inspiration around the garden.

However, since I'm not a particularly prolific blogger, I'll likely only be a very occasional contributor to this community.

But, on with the chosen roses.

At the base of both trellis panels on the pergola at the rear of the house, we've used 2x Climbing Icebergs to provide an all-white display over this structure, which frames the view from the kitchen window.  These are pot-grown specimens which were planted in the early autumn of last year, so they're the most established of all the new roses.

For the pergola leading onto the side lawn, at the northern end we've planted Zepherine Drouhin, a pink variety bought bare-root in December.   

At the southern end of this side pergola, near the junction of the northern and western walls of the summerhouse, there's a variety called Bathsheba, a bi-colour flower with white outer petals around an apricot centre.

From several specimens of this variety on the bench at the nursery, we chose one with breaking buds across multiple stems, because it's intended to train this rose up the pergola panel and also along the summerhouse walls, so we'll need to guide the new growth in three directions.

At the south-western corner of the summerhouse, near the accessway through onto the side lawn, we've planted a variety called Malvern Hills.   This one is actually a rambler, not a climber, with pale yellow flowers, and was the last to be planted out earlier this week.

And finally, the semi-goliath pergola panel at the side of the house has been underplanted with Ghislaine de Feligonde, another rambler but with orange / apricot blooms.  This one was bought bare-root late last year.

If you're seriously into roses, which I'm not, you may have spotted the common theme of all the varieties we've chosen, i.e. they're all either thornless types or said to be 'almost' thornless, whatever that might mean.  

Although we had a fantastic display of white roses along the fence at our previous house, and which was the inspiration for trying to repeat the effect in the garden here, I recall having my arms cut to ribbons from thorns during the end-of-year pruning required to keep the growth in check, and that was only from a single rose plant.   

Here there'll be six climbing roses to look after, but at least the maintenance should be relatively pain-free.

So at present the roses are in the ground and all are showing signs of strong new growth, but there's not much to see as yet.   As they develop, they'll be tied to the supports regularly to form the structure from which future years' flowers will emerge.

We'll likely also introduce some other climbing plants to train alongside the roses on at least some of the trellis panels, to help extend the period of flowering interest.

We'll post again with more photos if we get a decent show of flowers from any of them in this first year ...