Head Gardener's Blog: The Rose Walk

July and August in gardening is a time to try and make the garden shine. Mainly achieved by a repeated process of mowing, weeding, watering and deadheading.

One area of the garden here at Riverhill that requires a large chunk of that deadheading time is the rose walk. With around 200 roses it certainly feels that by the time you have worked your way, meticulously deadheading, down the rose walk and reach the end it's about time to turn around and start again.

Deadheading in July is the glorious end result of a lot of care over the rest of the year. Work on the roses starts right at the beginning of the year. In January all the wall roses are pruned and tied in. It's always a game trying to tie them all in in the bitter cold of midwinter when you can barely feel the tips of your fingers. At this point it couldn't be further from the sunny and fragranced air of July.

A couple of months go by before work starts on the rest of the roses. The roses in the main beds, are a mixture of Hybrid T’s and Floribundas. In a normal year these are pruned as the buds start to break in early March. This year however our roses here had a late prune at the end of March, they soon caught up but did start to flower slightly later. Just in time for the gardens to reopen. The Hybrid T's and Floribundas receive a hard prune back to 6-8 inches and 10-12 inches respectively. Once pruned they are treated to their first feed of the year. At Riverhill we use a specific granular rose food, a generous handful around the base of each one and then well watered in.

As soon as the leaves start to break our spraying regime starts. They get sprayed with a fungicide (for the dreaded blackspot, mildew and rust) and a foliar fertiliser, we use a liquid seaweed. They get applied on alternate weeks throughout the whole growing season. The fungicide is applied throughout the growing season as it works as a preventative rather than a cure.

The roses receive a second feed of granular feed at the end of July which should coincide with the first flush of flower finishing. This will hopefully encourage a second flush of flowers for the later weeks of summer.

On the rose walk the back end of the summer mainly focuses on deadheading and weeding. Leaves will start to fall off the roses as the year progresses and we always ensure that they are cleared up swiftly. This is because if there is any blackspot on the rose, the spores which live on the underside of the leaf can be released into the soil and therefore cause problems for following years.

Due to the exposed nature of the rose walk here at Riverhill we prune the roses by a third in November to help reduce the chance of windrock over the winter. In my first winter at Riverhill we did lose one rose to this, so subsequent years we have pruned all the taller roses back.

The last thing to be done in the year is to treat the roses to a good mulch. I prefer to use a well rotted horse manure but have used other well rotted manures when I've found horse manure difficult to come by. The timing of this is generally weather dependent. In fact in most years I have done this early in the new year once the ground has had a good soaking, therefore locking in all the rainwater for the next growing season.

Happy gardening!