The rose garden

Chapter 14 (extract 1) of "Roses for English Gardens" by Jekyll and Mawley (1902), in which Miss Jekyll talks of the implications of growing roses in rose gardens.

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Illustration: Rose beds in a lawn

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CHAPTER XIV

ROSE GARDENS

One of the many ways in which the splendid enthusiasm for good gardening—an enthusiasm which only grows stronger as time goes on—is showing itself, is in the general desire to use beautiful Roses more worthily. We are growing impatient of the usual Rose garden, generally a sort of target of concentric rings of beds placed upon turf, often with no special aim at connected design with the portions of the garden immediately about it, and filled with plants without a thought of their colour effect or any other worthy intention.

Now that there is such good and wonderfully varied material to be had, it is all the more encouraging to make Rose gardens more beautiful, not with beds of Roses alone—many a Rose garden is already too extensive in its display of mere beds—but to consider the many different ways in which Roses not only consent to grow but in which they live most happily and look their best. Beds we have had, and arches and bowers, but very little as yet in the whole range of possible Rose garden beauty.

The Rose garden at its best admits of many more beauties than these alone. Of the Roses we have now to choose from some are actual species, and many of them so nearly related to species that their wild way of growth may well be taken into account and provided for. Thus the beautiful milk-white Rosa Brunoni of the Himalayas is at its best climbing into some thin growth of bush or small tree. Many of the numerous new rambling Roses, children of another Himalayan Rose, that have been hybridised with other species, and again crossed to gain variety of colour and shape, willingly lend themselves to the same treatment. Many Roses, even some of those that one thinks of as rather stiff bushes, the Scotch Briers, Rosa lucida and the like, only want the opportunity of being planted on some height, as on the upper edge of a retaining wall, to show that they are capable of exhibiting quite unexpected forms of growth and gracefulness, for they will fling themselves down the face of the wall and flower all the better for the greater freedom. The beautiful and fast growing Rosa wichuriana, with its neat white bloom and polished foliage, will grow either up a support or down a steep bank, or festoon the face of a wall far below its roots, and to the adventurously minded amateur disclose whole ranges of delightful possibilities; while, stimulated by the increased demand, growers are every year producing new hybrids and clever crosses derived from this accommodating plant.

So the thought comes that the Rose garden ought to be far more beautiful and interesting than it has ever yet been. In the hope of leading others to do more justice to the lovely plants that are only waiting to be well used, I will describe and partly illustrate such a Rose garden as I think should be made. In this, as in so much other gardening, it is much to be desired that the formal and free ways should both be used. If the transition is not too abrupt the two are always best when brought into harmonious companionship. The beauty of the grand old gardens of the Italian Renaissance would be shorn of half their impressive dignity and of nearly all their poetry, were they deprived of the encircling forestlike thickets of Arbutus, Evergreen Oak, and other native growths. The English Rose garden that I delight to dream of is also embowered in native woodland, that shall approach it nearly enough to afford a passing shade in some of the sunny hours, though not so closely as to rob the Roses at the root.

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More: The ideal rose garden