Chapter 12 (extract 2) of "Roses for English Gardens" by Jekyll and Mawley (1902), in which Miss Jekyll explains how roses may best be used on garden walls.
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Illustration: Rose coming over a wall
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Many are the Roses for use on garden walls. They are detailed in lists referred to at the end of the chapter on Pillar Roses [link], and only some of the most remarkable need be here noticed.
In the south of England, walls facing south and south-west are too hot a place for many of the Roses commonly planted against them, although these exposures suit the tender Roses, the Noisettes, Banksias, Macartneys, and Fortune's Yellow, all of rambling growth. Here is also the place for the beautiful Persian Briers, including the scarlet so-called Austrian, the curious Abyssinian Rosa Ecae with yellow blooms the size of a shilling, Rosa simplicifolia Hardi with yellow flowers that have a dark blotch at the base of the petal, and Rosa microphylla, a flower whose character is quite its own. The double variety has the best bloom and is very ornamental; in both the double and single the prickly calyx is a remarkable feature, as is also the fruit of the type, which by retaining this curious calyx forms a strange-looking hip.
On garden walls of other exposures in the southern parts of England almost any of the free-growing Roses will do well. Naturally in the colder midlands and in the damper climates of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales the warm aspects may be used for more kinds of Roses, such as the Teas and Hybrid Teas.
Many a beautiful effect may be gained by a Rose planted on one side of a wall and trained to tumble over the top on to the other side. Often a south wall is devoted to rather tender shrubs; in such a place if a hardy cluster Rose, such as Dundee Rambler, is planted on the north side, a good mass of its bloom will come over and help to decorate the walls on the more precious or southern face.
It should be remembered that as Roses on walls want training and pruning that it is well, even if there is an important flower border in front, to have a little blind alley running within a foot or so of the wall. If they are not easy to get at they are apt to be neglected. There must be every facility for training, pruning, mulching and cutting. The pruning in this case consists in the removal of the older wood of these free-growing Roses; it must never be neglected, or the plant will soon grow thin and leggy. Who does not know the starved wall Rose in a worn-out border against a bare wall, with ten or twelve feet of naked stem and branch and famished growth of flower and leaf covered with green-fly? Perhaps within three feet of its root is a flourishing Ivy, with a stem as thick as a man's wrist, covering half the house and bulging with the loose untidy nests of house sparrows.
If we expect a Rose to give its beauty we should at least let it have fair play both above ground and below; in the ground by giving it proper space and nutriment, and above by watching for the time when old wood should be cut out, rampant young stuff tipped, and new flowering wood trained in.
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