About Basic Care

Covering the Ground

By Sue Streeper

What makes a pretty rose garden?  To the eye of many, a typical rose garden with one of every variety that you ever wanted is not the prettiest scene. Some coordination of plant types, colors, and growing habits can pull it all together. Adding companion plants is a possibility. Most of all, a landscaping plan is needed to give your garden the most visual impact.

One of the most important aspects of a landscaping plan which features roses involves massing of the same variety of rose. There is an inescapable impact of a group of six or ten of the same variety. The impact occurs because all of the plants do the same thing at the same time—same color, same habit and size, same bloom time. Think of some of the most dramatic public rose gardens you have seen. You probably remember large beds planted with multiples of one cultivar.

Fine, you say. Those gardens have lots of space for big beds, and I don’t. But you can do a similar thing on a smaller scale. Plant a row of Showbiz along the front of your house. Plant ten Simplicities along a fence or a wall. Use Playgirl, Europeana, or Iceberg the same way. Be sure to choose a color you love, a size that’s right for the space, and a variety that you know to be dependable in your area. Notice that all of these mentioned are floribundas.  Plant two to three feet apart, and be prepared for a glorious show.

You can mass hybrid teas as well, but you will probably want to mass floribundas or miniatures in front of them to hide their less-than-pretty lower canes. Touch of Class makes a nice mass planting. Olympiad is also a beautiful rose for planting in a large group. The white Class Act would be a nice floribunda to mass in front of either of those groups of hybrid teas, and the effect would be smashing because of the color contrast.

Watch color combinations. Red is dramatic with white. Soft pinks and yellows are lovely together. Mauve can go with other mauves or with white. Don’t put modern oranges with old-fashioned soft pastels, and never with mauves.

In terms of plant habit, don’t forget about the wonderful climbers. Everybody has walls and fences. Those spaces are crying to be planted with climbing roses. Exciting ones are coming along every year, with this year’s must-have being Fourth of July. Sally Holmes is another rose that deserves a wall or a trellis in everyone’s yard.

Shrubs, including the hugely popular David Austin roses, deserve some special treatment. They do not combine well with the stiff hybrid teas. Find a bed that you can devote just to shrubs, and you will find that they complement each other nicely. Some of them are so large that you can devote a bed tojust that one specimen plant, such as Swan, Graham Thomas, or Gertrude Jekyll.

Frankly, roses are easiest to care for if they are grown without any other plants underneath. Cleanup is very important in the rose garden, and that chore is facilitated if the ground is bare. You can rake and screen debris, or you can use a blower to tidy up. You can get close to the plants to cut blooms. But some people are just not happy with the effect of only roses spaced wide apart and only bare dirt underneath. Many want to combine other plants with their roses, and it is easy to see the charm of such plantings. In fact, in recent years we have used certain annuals and perennials in combination with some of our rose beds, and we love the result enough to put up with a little inconvenience. Here are the plants that we have found to be successful in combination with roses.

Annual forget-me-nots are the far-and-away champions of delightful small plants to use in rose beds. Here are the virtues of annual, not perennial, forget-me-nots. Their light blue color is a perfect contrast with most rose varieties, especially lovely under Furopeana. They are indestructible. You can walk on them, thin them out, bury most of them under mulch, and they just smile and pop up elsewhere. They rebloom several times a year without regard to season. One color pack about twenty years ago has resulted in literally thousands of seedlings thriving in our yard to this day. If they spread to an area where you don’t want them, they are easily pulled out. When they become old and unsightly, you can pull them out, and their good-looking next generation is already sprouting up. And their root structure even appears to improve the soil, leaving it crumbly and rich. These plants are awesome!

Alyssum is another possibility under roses. Like forget-me-nots, alyssum reseeds readily and is easily pulled out whenever it gets unsightly.  Feverfew, like the previous two, reseeds easily and will be with you for a long time after you have the first plant. It’s not a ground cover, however, since it grows taller and in clumps.

Polygonum capitatum is an interesting ground cover which does well under a rose that is not apt to get rust or mildew. I say that because this plant is a perennial which will make a mat under the rose and it is difficult to clean up fallen rose debris. It is also frost tender so it dies back in inland valleys in the winter, but it comes back when night temperatures rise in February. Polygonum cap is tough. It has a charming pink clover-like bloom.

Consider your garden plan as a whole. You will be pleased with the effect of mass plantings of roses and you may decide that certain plants under roses are pretty enough to merit the required extra effort.

This article was originally published in Rose Ramblings, Vol. LXXII, No. 3, March, 1999. © 1999 San Diego Rose Society, Inc.

Keywords: Planting, Planning, Design, Landscape

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