Roses in trees and free growing

Chapter 11 (extract) of "Roses for English Gardens" by Jekyll and Mawley (1902), in which Miss Jekyll describes the propensity of roses to climb into trees with vigour - and the dramatic visual effect of this.

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Illustration: Climbing Aimee Vibert on willows

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Everything that has been said of the Garland Rose, as to its use as a fountain Rose or free climber, may also be said of Dundee Rambler, Bennett's Seedling, Felicité-Perpétue, and others of the cluster Roses classed as Ayrshires. They are all worthy of use in these ways, and of being encouraged to clamber into trees and hedges. One cannot help observing how the support of a tree encourages almost abnormal growth. The wild Dog-rose will go up twenty feet, and Sweet-brier nearly as high; while almost any Rose that has at all a climbing habit will exert itself to the utmost to get high up into the tree.

Climbing Aimee Vibert is generally used as a pillar Rose, but the picture shows how it will rush up into a tree and increase, not only in height but in freedom of flowering.

The free-growing R. multiflora of the Himalayas also forms immense fountains, spreading in diameter by naturally rooted layers, from which new plants take root at the outer circumference of the great bush, throwing up strong growths, and so continually increasing its area. The large flowered one (R. multiflora grandiflora), as well as the double kind, are valuable varieties, with all the freedom of the type, while each has its own distinct development of somewhat the same class of beauty.

For spaces between garden and wild, for sloping banks, for broken ground, as of an old gravel pit or other excavation, for all sorts of odds and ends of unclassified places about the home grounds, the rambling and free-growing Roses seem to be offered us by a specially benevolent horticultural providence. A well-prepared hole is all they need at first. About four years after planting, if the best they can do for us is desired, they should be looked to in the way of removing old wood. This should be done every two years, but beyond this they need no pruning and no staking whatever. When they begin to grow freely among bushes or trees, if it is desired to lead the far reaching growths one way rather than another, it is easily done with a long forked stick, and a very pleasant and interesting job it is. It is like painting a picture with an immensely long-handled brush, for with a fourteen-foot pole with a forked end one can guide the branches into Yew or Holly or tall Thorn very nearly into such forms of upright spring or downward swag as one pleases.

It is pleasant, too, in such rough places, to see the behaviour of one of these Roses on the ground without support, and to watch the different way of its own brother plant climbing into a neighbouring tree.

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More: Roses as fountains