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It is difficult to find a person who is indifferent to a rose. This amazing plant impresses with the perfection of its shape and color – a proud stem with dark green leaves and sharp thorns crowns an exquisite and at the same time majestic flower, composed of delicate petals. Rose does not need a story, does not need an interior – she is beautiful here and now, when she is near, the look does not look for anything else. It would seem that it is worth planting a lot of roses, you get a beautiful rose garden that can ennoble any territory. But everything can turn out the other way around if you ignore the basic laws of landscape design, do not think over the design of the rose garden.
Choosing a place, schemes
How to make a rose garden so that it delights with its beauty and creates the right mood? First you need to determine where to place it and what mood it should create. Bright lush roses create a feeling of joy and celebration, which can be enhanced by plants with the appropriate scent. Plantings of such flowers can be met at the entrance to the site or delight the eye and heart in the middle of the lawn. Weaving roses winding along the facade can turn a country house into a fairy tale home. An arch of them can be arranged at the entrance to the yard, and they can also be attached to the fence. More restrained aristocratic flower beds are created from ground cover plants or bushes of medium height, strictly matched in color. A completely different, romantic corner can be created by old English roses with a strong smell, among which a bench or a coffee table with chairs will bring great pleasure.
You need to think about how to make a rosary in advance. Seedlings are planted in the fall, before that time you need to think about a combination of flowers and varieties, create a scheme, find a place, prepare the ground. A rose garden in a garden cannot be organized anywhere. Roses love the sun, so you need to find a place where tall trees or buildings will allow the flowers to be in the sun for at least 6 hours.
The most ideal option for the location of the rose garden is when the sun shines 3-4 hours before lunch and the same amount after. If the landscape is not even, then you need to choose a southern slope for roses, otherwise the plants will grow one-sided, because they always reach for warmth. The place must be chosen or created calm, with fertile, well-drained soil, neutral or slightly acidified. A light loam is suitable, on which water will not stagnate.
Another point that usually needs to be considered before setting up any flower garden is the viewpoint. If it is visible from one side, then the plants are arranged according to growth in this way: in the background are the tallest, and these can be old, climbing or standard roses, bushes are planted in front of them lower in growth, ground cover and miniature are placed in the foreground. If the flower garden is viewed from all sides, it is very effective to grow a standard rose or climbing roses in its center, based on a special support.
Video “Rosary as a design solution”
Demonstrative video with examples of design solutions using rose gardens.
Choice of varieties
A common mistake, or rather a complete lack of design, which can ruin all beauty, is an attempt to plant beautiful specimens of rose bushes without thinking through their combination. Plants similar in color do not emphasize, but lubricate each other. It is better to choose contrasting colors or different, but harmoniously combined. The black earth between the plants most often looks like a mourning background. Planting roses is best combined with other plants that will favorably shade their beauty and close the gaps between them. A flowerbed consisting of only roses looks bad when they do not bloom, and in the cold season only the material that covers them is visible. For these reasons, it is also good to grow other crops next to roses.
There is a truly unthinkable number of varieties of roses, if you choose them wisely, you can create a unique design for your rose garden. It is important to remember that seedlings of specimens similar in color will blur the whole picture, so it is better to arrange plantings of different, better even contrasting colors, and make sure that high-grade roses do not obscure their undersized relatives.
Shrubs, or semi-climbing, roses are both low ground cover and tall, they are used for mixborders, or planted as single bushes among the lawn. Flowers of English roses (also belong to scrubs) resemble peonies of the most unimaginable colors. Their compact bushes are often used in various types of rose gardens. They, like French varieties, bloom repeatedly, which is very convenient for landscape design.
Before this proceed to the choice of varieties, you need to decide on the color scheme and growth height. Only after that you can choose varieties, having studied very carefully the description of their adult plants. If it is very difficult to choose varieties on your own, you can first buy a set of seedlings already formed for one flower garden. Or look on the Internet for suggested lists of varieties, but there may be inaccuracies due to the fact that some variety may be difficult to find.
Forming a rose garden
Rose seedlings are best planted in autumn, so the preparation of a place for a rose garden should begin in the summer. The soil is dug up to a depth of 60 cm, fertilizers are applied to it – it can be humus (compost, peat), ammonium nitrate, potassium chloride and superphosphate. A couple of months after that, you don’t need to touch the ground, it will settle, fertilizers will be distributed, and the soil will be ready for autumn planting. If the soil is very heavy, it should be mixed with peat or compost at a higher concentration than just to add nutrition. You can add rotted sawdust. It is important that groundwater does not lie too close.
When the time comes for planting seedlings, it is necessary to dig holes 50 cm deep, according to the rose garden scheme. It is good if this scheme is printed on a sheet of paper and you can always check it. Before planting seedlings, their roots are moistened, broken roots are cut off, and it is also better to cut the aerial part a little. Plants should be kept so that the roots look vertically down, lower them into the prepared holes, gently sprinkle with nutrient soil, lightly tamp.
40–50 cm are left between miniature dwarf roses. There should be a gap of up to 100 cm between low hybrid tea roses, 115 cm between standard and slow-growing weaving roses, and high park roses, weeping standard roses and fast-growing weaving roses are planted after 1,5 meters. Only after planting all the roses, you can start planting neighbors – other plants in the flower garden.
After planting, the plants are watered well and covered with peat or sawdust so as to hide all the shoots. In the spring, overwintered roses are pruned a little more, sprinkled with peat. When planting a standard rose tree, a wooden stake is dug in next to it from the leeward side and a rose is tied to it. This will protect it from strong winds and rains. The soil in the rose garden is often mulched, it is advisable to do this in the spring, when the plants overwinter well.
Roses in landscape design
The design of flower beds can be the most diverse, but there are two main types: regular, also called parterre, and landscape. A regular rose garden implies clear planting boundaries. Moreover, these borders are necessarily decorated with stone, plastic or vegetable borders. Flower beds have geometric shapes that are visible even along the upper border – the height of the roses is the same or with some kind of accent, clearly subordinate to the overall design.
Landscape-type rose gardens are characterized by a freer design. A variety of types and varieties of roses can be used here, planting seedlings should give the impression of natural thickets. Mixed beds suggest the presence of other plants, these can be ground covers that create a background or tall conifers that contrast in color with roses.
A structural rose garden, as a variant of the landscape type, can occupy a large area. Inside it, paths and paths are supposed to make it possible to get closer to a particular plant. Another option of this type is landscape. It is designed to emphasize the natural beauty of the place – different levels are emphasized by lush or, on the contrary, lonely plantings of roses and other plants. Here, natural or created landscape highlights, slides, lowlands, and reservoirs are played up.
The rose in landscape design is always the queen, it should be the most noticeable, all other plants play the role of retinue. Therefore, among them there should not be lush and bright, capable of diverting attention from the prima. Do not plant nearby peonies, delphiniums, gladioli. Herbaceous plants of light, gray, bluish, silvery or dark green color are perfect. Hostas, junipers, sage – perfectly set off the beauty of roses.
Video “Landscape design of the site”
Video selection of examples of landscape design of flower beds with roses.
