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How to Grow: Landscape Roses
Learn how to grow, select and care for landscape roses.
Roses have a reputation of being hard to grow. If you go to a garden center you’ll see the hybrid tea and floribunda roses abound, but a lot of those roses have disease problems. They also maybe not be very hardy in cold areas and they require some maintenance and extra fertilization. But the new landscape or shrub roses have changed all of that. These came about about 20 or 30 years ago. These are beautiful shrubs that bloom all season long and they don’t have the disease problems. They’re hardy and they’re relatively carefree.
Landscape roses all started with the French Meidiland roses and a variety like this beautiful one, this is ‘Bonica’. It grows 3 feet or so tall with soft pink flowers that repeat bloom in summer. Even when it’s not flowering it’s an attractive shrub in the flower garden. Some of these landscape roses sprawl more than grow vertical, like this Apricot Drift rose. It grows 2 to 3 feet tall and could spread 3 to 4 feet wide. These roses not only look great in the flower garden they can be used as ground covers or an informal low hedge. Not only are these landscape and shrub roses coming in red and pink colors, but the flower range is expanding, too. With more breeding this Oso Easy ‘Urban Legend’ red rose stays only 2 feet tall and wide with glossy green leaves and nice velvety red flowers.
Though not in the landscape rose category, for those gardeners in cold climates we had a hard time getting roses to survive the winter, try the David Austin shrub roses. ‘Countryman’ is a landscape rose that’s 4 feet tall with bright red semi-double flowers. It comes back again each year for 10 years now and is hardy to zones 4 and 5. Easy Elegance ‘Coral Cove’ is a delightful rose with orange, double flowers and a nice scent. We do grow a few hybrid roses. ‘Julia Childs’ is a floribunda rose with buttery yellow, double flowers and a spicy, sweet scent.
What all of these landscape and shrub roses have in common is good disease resistance, repeat blooming and hardiness. They’re beautiful shrubs in the landscape and they flower throughout the summer. So fall in love with roses all over again and check these out.
