How to Grow: Landscape Roses

Learn how to grow, select and care for landscape roses.

Transcript

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 ‘Red Carpet’ 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 Rosy Apricot colored beauty is in the Drift series. It stays only 2 feet tall and wide with glossy green leaves and nice double 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 Canadian shrub roses. ‘John Franklin’ is part of the Canadian Explorer series. This bright red semi-double flowered shrub rose is tough as nails producing flowers and shrubbery growth consistently every spring and repeat blooms in the summer. There are many other landscape and shrub roses coming out in the  market. One is called the Oso Easy series. These are dwarf little plants are hardy to zone 3 and even have a fragrance.

What all of these landscape and shrub roses have in common is good disease resistance. So you can throw away the pesticide sprayer. You won’t need it anymore. 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.

Go here for more on growing roses.