As spring turns into summer, one of the nation’s favourite plants comes to the fore, the rose. As with daffodils a couple of months ago to talk about “the rose” doesn’t do justice to the wealth of options that roses offer to the gardener. From containers, through individual specimens and rose beds to ground cover, climbers and ramblers there is a rose for every situation. With flower forms ranging from very simple to many petalled and a wide variety of colours to choose from it would be hard not to find a rose that you like. Many roses are now repeat flowerers, so although they hit a first peak in June many cultivars will give you blooms throughout the summer and autumn.

We have a fairly small garden, but have devoted one bed to roses.  It is edged with lavender and Erigeron karvinskianus (Mexican fleabane) and contains five roses, four grown as shrubs and a central one trained up a pergola.  The photo below shows it in its first spring after planting.

7 March 2020

Even with young plants, we got a good display later in the year.  You may remember that the spring of 2020 was very warm, so the plants were ahead of normal that year.

Rose bed 29 May

Now that the plants are maturing we have pruned and trained them so that the flowers are presented above the edging plants.

Rose bed June 2022

Roses do need pruning on a regular basis, but if you remember the basic rules that the plant will do best with good airflow around it then pruning doesn’t have to be considered as some arcane skill. A nice open shape with a smaller number of strong stems will do much better than a plant that is crowded with more weaker stems.  A piece of advice we were given was to prune in late February and to aim for a structure that looked like an open upturned hand with 5 main stems.

In the vegetable garden, June should see the first harvests of peas. Harvest may not be the right word as the first few pickings of peas on our allotment rarely make it home. Instead, they are an immediate treat for the workers. Many fruits and vegetables are at their best when picked and eaten fresh and few are better examples of this than peas. Eating them early also means that there is less danger of encountering pea moth caterpillars, which become more prevalent as the season wears on.