The annual message I love being able to repeat is this one: what a year in Britain for roses. Yet again they have been flowering prolifically. They have held their flowers for so long in a June that began without hot days. They seem to revel in the pattern of recent winters and springs. A wet and generally mild winter gives them a store of moisture at the roots. Little or no frost in April suits their young shoots as they emerge.
Even so, I hesitate to define what roses really like. I have seen so many great years for them prefaced by weather at opposite ends of the spectrum. My own hunch is that they like plenty of water, especially if they are growing in pots. I have been tending a top tip there, the double pink- flowered Eustacia Vye. Its breeder, David Austin, commended it to me when we chatted for the last time before his death in 2018. It drops its petals in rain but likes to be kept well watered round its roots. Do not judge it by its first year: mine is improving with age.
Since late April, climbing roses have been superb against sunny walls, flowering as early as I remember. For the first time, roses in Chelsea were in sync with those in Provence. Ramblers followed, revelling in the clear weather without faltering in the drought; my thorny white Seagull, bred in 1907, has been especially fine all June, running up a hedge of ugly Leyland Cypress and covering much of it. It is still sold by Peter Beales roses.
Shrub and bush roses have been covered in flower too, with little, as yet, of the black spot disease which later disfigures their leaves. Spray in May and go away, to adapt the old stock market saying; against black spot I use Vitax Organic Rose Guard in early May, but if the disease appears nonetheless I change to Fungus Clear Ultra 2. Even then, the problem is contained but not eliminated. Roses are not killed by black spot but it makes a mess of their leaves and weakens them.
Here are some notes from my top 2025 moments with roses so far. Underlying them is a constant question: old roses or new ones? When indeed does a new rose become an “old” rose? Does the question matter if you just want beauty, and a rose to be a robust bearer of it?
At the Chelsea Flower Show I was impressed by the latest David Austin introduction, the King’s Rose, one which David Austin senior himself selected before his death six years ago. The King’s Rose is the first rose with stripy markings to be bred and marketed by the Austin team. There are lovely old striped roses already. In 1999 they were joined by Crazy For You, a red and white splashed floribunda, which is worth rediscovering.
The King’s Rose does not make older stripy varieties superfluous. In fact, it owes its name to an old rose singled out by King Charles when he was Prince of Wales in the early 1990s. On an Austin exhibit at Chelsea he pointed to the excellent striped red and white rose Ferdinand Pichard, bred in 1921, and told young David Austin that it was the first rose he himself had ever planted. The comment lived on in Austin’s mind and years later, when a fine stripy seedling came to the fore in the Austin breeding programme, he named it the King’s Rose as a tribute. He has linked its launch to the King’s Foundation. Its flowers are loosely semi-double and their white ground is streaked with dashes of fuchsia pink. There is a scent, too, though not notable in the heat of a crowded Chelsea show.
Among age-old roses, Rosa Mundi is more vividly striped and has a better scent. In the fine gardens at Kiftsgate Court in Gloucestershire, it is planted as a low hedge in the long rose border below that local monster, the famous white rambling rose called Kiftsgate. The Rosa Mundi edging is one of the garden’s great sights in June, but then its flowering season is over and the bushes tend to be disfigured by black spot. A great picker and placer of old roses, Nancy Lancaster was a beacon of Anglo-American taste in the 1960s and 1970s, and in her Oxfordshire garden she too grew Rosa Mundi as an edging plant. However, she cut it down nearly to ground level after flowering and left an edging of dianthus to carry on the display.
The King’s Rose wins here. It flowers freely, not once but three times in a season. It is far healthier than stripy Rosa Mundi. It is also taller, as it makes an upright bush, vase-shaped in Austin’s view, to a height of about 4 feet. I kept on returning to consider it at Chelsea and appreciated its value, a stripy rose with qualities no stripy has had in gardens so far. It is certainly a buy, an upright rose bush which could be readily placed as an individual in an urban garden.
Gardeners may feel bewildered by the number of Austin roses which have come to market since the 1960s, many of them now dropped from the nursery’s sale list. However, a newish one, Kew Gardens, is a lasting winner. Its white flowers are single, not double, but they make a bold impression as they are held in broad clusters on strong stems and appear in great waves until late autumn. There are older single-flowered white roses, but none has Kew Gardens’ stamina and ability to repeat prolifically throughout the year. Last spring I planted groups of five bushes of it, each spaced 5ft apart, alternating them with groups of the double strong-pink Gertrude Jekyll, another Austin winner. Already they are a fine spectacle, set to improve yearly. I recommend them, examples of progress in rose breeding.
Kew Gardens refutes a misplaced criticism of modern shrub roses, that they have such double flowers that bees avoid them as they are unable to reach any pollen in their centres. Bees love my Kew Gardens bushes, just as they also love Austin’s good yellowish Dannahue or his pale pink climbing rose The Generous Gardener, and many of his roses with cupped, open-centred flowers, Scepter’d Isle being a good pink example. Catalogues of them now include a bee symbol to mark roses which attract bees. So does the big list from Peter Beales Roses in Norfolk.
The roses least listed by Austin are red ones. Here oldies can prevail, as I verified recently in a friend’s collection. Two fine dark reds were Black Prince, about 5ft high and strongly scented, and Crimson Glory, also strongly scented but kept as a bush 3ft high. Black Prince was launched in 1866; it ranks as a hybrid perpetual and flowers twice a year. Crimson Glory was launched in 1935, old by now though a novelty 90 years ago. Bushes of it have big flowers with a velvet tone to their deep red.
The best new roses have new virtues, but they do not make all others obsolete. We need both old and new. This great year for roses, the fourth in a row, brings the pleasure of finding yet more to want.
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