Roses are the classical flowers and make the heart of a garden. With little care and maintenance, you can grow them easily in your lawn and backyard. They’re alluring, sweet-scented, and colorful bloomers. There are approximately 300 species of these woody flowering perennials having several thousand varieties cultivated worldwide.
There are many characteristics to consider when you are selecting the perfect rose for your garden, which include color, size, fragrance, growing habit, hardiness, and disease resistance.
This article provides best practices regarding important characteristics of various types of roses that bloom and perform excellently in most conditions and make your garden cheerful.
Hybrid Tea Roses:
These types of roses are a hybrid of perpetual roses and old-fashioned tea roses. They are famous all around the world and make excellent garden flowers. Their attributes include attractive and vibrant shade/hue/colors, breathtaking fragrance, and being low maintenance. They can be easily grown anywhere. Hybrid tea rose is a deciduous plant (sheds its leaves annually) and requires full sun to grow.
A well-drained loamy soil having pH 6-6.5 is perfect for their growth. Each stem bears a single flower of 4-5 inches (10-12 cm) in size, with 50-60 petals. They keep blooming throughout the growing season in a range of colors (yellow, purple, white, orange, red, pink, etc.).
Popular varieties include Veterans, Honor, Tropicana, Peace, and Purple Passion.
Floribundas
Floribundas are excellent for landscaping. They have a short height, blooms in large clusters with a wide range of vibrant shades that make them ideal for bed and border planting. Unlike hybrid teas and grandifloras, they tend to bloom continuously throughout the season (spring to frost) to make a beautiful focal point in your garden. They produce less scented flowers, but new fragrant breeds are now developing.
Floribundas are hardy, resistant to diseases, easier to grow and require low maintenance. Pretty varieties of these roses include Julia Child, Impatient, Iceberg, and Hot Cocoa.
Grandiflora Roses
Grandiflora roses produce large, showy flowers. They are a combination of hybrid teas and floribundas. These tall roses (up to 7 ft) are perfect to use in hedges and flower borders. They bloom in summer, and we can propagate them with stem cuttings. They generally require full sun and well-drained soils. If your soil is poor, amend it by adding a good potting mix or peat moss to lighten it. They are hardy and disease resistant.
Grandiflora blooms on a long stem and makes the best cut flowers. They continuously bloom in clusters to spread a sweet floral scent in your garden. They are available in various colors that provide countless options for your garden. Fragrant Plum, Gold Medal, and Lagerfeld Rose are some famous Grandiflora rose bushes.
Polyantha Roses
These are a cross of wild roses. Polyantha roses are incredibly robust, having versatile characteristics. They are compact, hardy, highly disease resistant, and do not require much water and fertilizer. The flower blooms non-stop in clusters as single or double showy flowers from June to frost. They are perfect for growing in your garden, and we can use them as pot or container roses, ground covers, hedges, and edges. Some of the beautiful polyantha roses are Margo’s Baby, The Fairy, and Cecile Brunner Rose.
Miniature Roses
They make a beautiful addition to your backyard or lawn. Scientists have bred them to grow small in size, and these are available in a wide range of varieties. Miniature roses are pretty hardy plants, but they possess small roots, so you have to provide frequent watering.
Areas with full sunshine and fresh air are perfect for their growth. They bloom repeatedly and are available in many colors, including red, pink, yellow, peach, orange, white, etc. Their height can reach up to 10 inches (25 cm), which makes them perfect for small gardens. You can plant them in a pot, containers, or as a border or edges in front of tall rose plants. Some best varieties are Cupcake, Innocence, Caliente, Salute (red), and Autumn Splendor (yellow and red blend).
Shrub Roses
As indicated by the name, you can easily identify these roses by their spreading growth habit. Shrub roses are a diverse group with a great range of color, fragrance, and flowering style. They have a spreading nature and are generally winter hardy, easy growing, and produce vigorous flower clusters, with continuous blooming. These flowers are ideal for hedges, screens, and mass planting. Flower Carpet, Easy Elegance, Drift, and Home Run are some excellent varieties of shrub roses.
Climber and Rambler Roses:
The roses in this category are characterized by long, arching stiff branches that need to train onto fences, trellises, and pergolas. They are not vines. They are more cold hardy as compared to other rose types. Climbers and ramblers are only different in terms of their bloom size and length of flowering seasons. The ramblers produce small, charming roses in large numbers. Sometimes, a single stem can hold more than 20 flowers that last for several weeks.
The climber produces showy, large flowers but in small numbers. You can grow them to cover large spaces, to create privacy screens, and to hide walls. Dublin Bay Rose, New Dawn Rose, Altissimo Rose, and Penny Lane Rose are some famous climber roses varieties. Some beautiful rambler roses include Darlow’s Enigma Rose, The King’s Rubies Rose, and Alexandre Girault Rose.
Ground-cover Roses
These roses are typically easy to grow, disease-resistant, and flowers continuously throughout the growing season. They are short stature sprawling plants 12-36 inches (30-91cm) tall but spread wider than their height (4-6 feet or more). Some ground-cover roses lack scent, but flower profusely in a wide range of colors (pink, yellow, red, orange, white, purple).
These ground-cover roses can perform many roles in your garden. You can grow these beauties where you want low-growing plants with continuous colors. The options might include edging a path, covering a slope, cascading over a wall, and growing in containers.
Blanket roses, Flower carpet roses, Drift roses, and Shrublet roses are important ground-cover rose types.
Conclusion
- Roses are the classical perennial flowers that shift your garden into heaven.
- When selecting a rose, check out which classification it falls in, as this will give valuable information about its growth habit and other characteristics.
- Make sure any rose you intend to include in your garden meets your criteria in terms of size, color, fragrance, care, and space requirements.
- Considering these attributes will also help you in choosing the right variety of roses for your garden.
