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Roses in a Mixed Border—A Simple Design for Spectacular Summer Flowers
Plants & Gardens News Volume 20, Number 2 | Summer 2005
by Anne O’Neill
Roses can be used all over the garden, not only as invaluable flowering shrubs but also to frame entrances and to climb and spill over walls, fences, and even ugly garages. These unusually generous woody plants—with their wide range of forms, splendid flowers, and strikingly elegant hips—also thrive in mixed plantings and look particularly well with plants that provide spring and midsummer interest.
The design here combines some of my favorite rose varieties with a number of great summer-blooming perennial and annual bedfellows. Change annual companions each year to add variety to the design (cosmos and dill always look great with roses). Plant spring-flowering bulbs such as snowdrop, grape hyacinth, Narcissus 'Barrett Browning' (daffodil), and Scilla siberica 'Spring Beauty' (Siberian squill) for early-season flowers. Make sure the roses have well-drained, fertile soil, at least five hours of sunshine per day, and adequate space for good circulation.
- Artemisia 'Powis Castle'
- Clematis 'General Sikorsky'
- Foeniculum vulgare (fennel)
- Geranium cinereum
- Perovskia atriplicifolia 'Filagran' (Russian sage)
- Rosa 'Altissimo'
- Rosa glauca
- Rosa 'Sally Holmes'
- Rosa 'Sombreuil'
- Rosa 'Souvenir de St. Anne's'
- Salvia nemorosa
Anne O'Neill is curator of the Cranford Rose Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Illustration: Paul Harwood