Rose Tour in our 250 Year Old Cottage Garden | David Austin Roses & Summer Flowers

Welcome back to our cottage garden, it's the end of June and today we're going to take you on a Most of our roses are from David Austin, I visited their shop maybe three or four years ago pre-pandemic and that was before we moved We made a list of all the ones we liked and then every time we could afford one We've been buying them and adding them to the garden. For about three years, most of them were actually added this year so a lot of them are quite small But I'll show you the established ones as well to give us a sense of what we have to look I'm going to show you a little bit about how we take care of them. Let's walk towards the house and I'll show you our first rose. I'm actually just going to do some deadheaded on this one as This one we planted a couple of weeks ago so it's I'd love to train it over the door but I think the way the The sun lands in this space it will do better if I train it over this window behind me which will I'll probably train that over the years so that the branches go this way It's this really lovely soft yellow color and I think this is the only yellow rose we have in the garden. But other colors are starting to grow on me now so I think I'll be adding more So let's go ahead and deadhead this one. I deadhead all the roses that will repeat flower and it just means the plant is going to put its energy into creating new flowers instead of forming rose hips. I don't kill them because the rose hips are good food for the birds. and it also just helps the roses look a little neat when you remove the spent flowers as well. Sometimes it feels a little ruthless when you're in a room with a lot of people. You're taking off so many of the flowers but it's definitely a good thing to do to prolong the We probably get three or four flushes of So I think I've got all the I've spent flowers now and that one's looking much better already. So nestled on the fence next to me is a rose named Claire Austin. This is another climber by David Austin and this one is doing really, really well. I'm surprised by how well this one's doing because this is our worst area for soil in the garden. It's very, very heavy clay, although that does mean there's more nutrients in there. You can see there's a lot of buds on this one and It's a really soft cream white color, very delicate pretty pink. years ago which explains why it's a little bigger than some of the others we have and it's So I'm going to climb in and show you up close and I'm also going to do I'm a little deadheaded on this one as well. It's been growing so much it might benefit from me cleaning it up a bit. I guess you would call it the stem so that that's where the new growth will form. Just cut them at the base of the flower you need to go back to the junction otherwise this bit of I'd say so far this year this has been a little bit more than a year. It has bloomed once already with a massive flush of I'm really amazed. I think that's probably the most We can go up to the garden and I'll show you some more roses. So if any part of our garden was going to be called a rose garden it would be this area. This is where I planted most of the roses that we bought immediately when we moved in so these They're a really amazing size now, really lovely. I'm not always happy with the flowers I choose, but... Because they're so big and healthy I left them in and my feelings have changed somewhat over time while we've added more flowers to this bit but initially I thought this area was a bit too pink and I wanted to tone it down a little so the first roses that I planted when we moved in They're called Queen Elizabeth and I didn't buy these from David Austin I just got them from our local They're a floribunda rose so they can get really leggy and tall like you can see I didn't expect it to get this tall this year. I'm going to trim it harder this time seeing what's happened to it now but They're a really vibrant pink rose. A little too vibrant for my taste, but they're so healthy. And they love the soil here so I do want to leave them in but I don't think I'd buy them again This rose is called Compassion and this is a climbing rose this is another one that I I bought it from our local garden center. However, I think David Austin does carry this one if it's One that you want to grow so it's a climber and my goal with this is to cover the fence somewhat It works as a kind of screen so that we have this foliage in the months outside of winter and then Obviously in the summer we have these amazing big flowers and this is another one that I don't I love the color because it's quite vibrant. It's an orange peachy yellow pink color, but I do. I really like what happens to this as it's been blooming for a few days and the sun starts to mute the color slightly and I think that's how I feel about this area of the garden as a whole When the flowers first emerge they are a little bright for my taste but after a few days it becomes Really nice and muted and more of a kind of aged feel which I much prefer so again this is a rose It's thriving. It's doing really well. I haven't deadheaded it yet. So we've had a flush already and now we've got a flush. We got our second flush of flowers and you can see another set of buds emerging for when this I love the way these roses bloom in bunches on a single It looks really high impact when I was pruning this one in winter I tried to train it In the swoops what I learned was if you train a rose in a kind of curved shape it sends more upwards And then you end up with more flowers at a good visible height however I think what I've learned from doing that is that these are blooming too high up and I would like them to I'll probably prune this harder in the winter but it's such a continuous This is only my third year of growing roses and every year I learn so much find new I just fall in love with and it's a long it's a long process but I do find them a Very easy and rewarding flower to grow a good tip is to clean your cuttings between pruning the different roses to prevent the spread of things like black spots I'm actually not doing that now But usually I do and then when I'm disposing of the remnants of the roses I put this in the green Just in case there's any black spot on here you see some of the leaves don't look the I'll put it in the green trash can and that's compassion. I'm amazed at this one. It's done really well this year and the colors look quite different this one. I don't know if that's something to do with the composition of the soil but it looks a lot It's nicer than it was last year so next to compassion we have Olivia Rose Austin I'll just move I'm going to show you this one. This is Olivia Rose Austin. So it looks like a tree and the flowers are then quite high up which means I have space to I'm not done planting this one so the The soil is a little bare but we'll get there over time. This one I planted when we moved in. So it's been here for three years and it's an amazing size now I love this one It smells really good. It's a little like Turkish delight. And it's a beautiful soft pink. The color fades to a grayish color. I think this is probably my favorite color in terms of The color smell and the way the flowers look I guess that's the most reasons maybe we can say this one's I think I got about four Olivia Rose Austin plants, two of which are trained. I'll show you the second one in a minute but it's not as healthy as this one. I haven't deadheaded this one yet so let's go ahead and take off some of the spent flowers But you can see this is another repeat flower we've had a flush already that's gone over We're in our second flush and it's preparing for a third with all these nice little buds on So this is something that blooms really continuously throughout the summer and such a It's a good thing to have in the garden in the winter. How do I take care of these roses? And there's nothing scientific about those two methods. It's just... Because the dogs eat the compost if we mulch these with compost so higher up the garden they Get a nice thick mulch of homemade compost and then lower down the garden they get store-bought Compost because the dogs are less interested in eating that and these roses also get a homemade fertilizer that's made from our food waste so we do hot composting and as the food compost In the container it releases a liquid I believe it's called Lechlade something similar It's a brown liquid. It works really well as a plant food. So you dilute it with some water. And then pour that over here. I probably do that once a week once every two weeks and it feeds. the plant while it's in flower and then at the top of the garden I use a seaweed fertilizer and I usually feed on leaves which means I spray the leaves in the evening and that's how we look After them because this is such a vigorous rose sometimes pruning it's a little tricky Because it's quite spiky can get scratched so you just need to be a little careful and these just They look so much better after a good prune they look really neat really showy and there are still so many Flowers on there you expect it to look a little patchy but it doesn't these just fall apart As soon as you cut them off shows that they are ready to be cut so I'm going to empty this into Our green trash can and then I'll come back and show you the rest of our roses I just want to Quickly show you our second Olivia Rose Austin standard rose you can see this one is much smaller I planted it at the same time three years ago and I think it's partly because of it. I'm in a pot and at this point I probably should refresh the compost so it has some new nutrients I think it's also to do with how the sun falls on the garden so things do bloom better. on this side and then it's also partially shaded by this tree so my plans for this one eventually I I'll move it however I do like having a kind of small and compact version of Olivia Rose Austin Well it's much easier to maintain but it still looks pretty so I'm just going to do a little A little deadheaded on that one next let's go up to the next section of our garden bear with us While this little piece of the garden is a little messy this is James Galway this is a climber by David Austin the color looks different this year to how it looked last year it looked much more Red in the center of the rose last year whereas now it's quite a faded pink color I'm surprised I'm sure this one is flowering at all given that it's more or less in complete shade I definitely have I planted it in the wrong place but my goal for this area again is to cover the fences with something I think perhaps a climbing rose was not the best idea given how little sunlight this area gets. But who knows if it's blooming. It should be a repeat bloomer. But last year it didn't. I think it's just not getting enough light so possibly I'll train it further along The fence towards the sunlight that's something to think about as time goes on but it's looking really lovely now and just a little bit of deadheaded to do there now let's go to the On the other hand, this is a work in progress too. What I'm starting to do here is create a rose hedge. And I'm using the rose Emily Bronte again by David Austin it's a shrub rose that you can use to I'm just going to pull it forward so you can see the flowers they're really gorgeous yellow orange kind of color in the middle and then they fade to a pink on the I love this rose but as you can see it may need to be I have three of these plants, however, they're all really young so it doesn't look very Impressive yet but I'm hoping over the next couple of years this will pad out slightly Some of the things I deal with in this area that are making it difficult are the shade from this tree I've actually pruned this back a lot already but I think I need to do it a little more just to Light up here and these are shade tolerant roses but they do need some light and I also got Skeptid island at the end of this rose hedge here and that was just because I didn't have another Emily Bronte rose at the time so I moved this one down here this rose has actually struggled to get I'll give that a deadhead it looks better than It did last year but last year it looked really unhealthy however the Emily Bronte roses are Doing really well and hopefully next year we can look at this and it will look a little more Interestingly, there are actually two new rose plants behind me that haven't bloomed yet. I bought these as bare root roses at the very end of bare root season must have been February kind of time and one of them is called Scarborough Fair the other one I can't remember the name But they're both gifts that friends gave us as a wedding present. We got married last September. And so I planted those late in the winter they haven't bloomed yet they're still getting established And I do need to clear this area out because it was very overgrown when we moved in and I'm still I'm trying to keep up with it, but that's something to look forward to. Maybe this year. Next year this rose here is called the generous gardener and I wish it was blooming so I could I'll show you how amazing the flowers are but you can see there's a lot of buds on there this one I planted when we moved in so three years ago and it gives me a lot of hope for how big the other The roses are going to get while most of our roses are new I wanted this to cover the wall and it's I've done that already so we'll probably continue to climb it over the duck enclosure but you can see There's an amazing amount of buds on here and I'm quite surprised because this is a very shady area It gets a little sun I think in the morning but in the afternoon it's more or less in complete I didn't expect this to perform as well as it has but there are so many buds on there I really can't wait to see how this looks in a week or two time we had a little flush of flowers Which I'm gonna deadhead now but probably only about three however they were really pretty and Then to the other side of me this is more of a messy area but I have planted a rose here that is It's called a seagull or otherwise known as a wandering rector and it's a rose that comes with a warning Because it grows so aggressively but my goal is to climb it up this plum tree just so that there is a A good sequence of flowers that feed the bees as you may have noticed most of the roses that I have So far, you've shown that they're completely useless to pollinators because they spend most of their time lives completely covered in really tight ruffled petals so it's good to have these single-flowering Roses though they may look a little more old-fashioned a little more simple they are a good thing to I have in the garden so that one has put on a lot of growth already I can see why people say be I planted this one about six months ago. I think it's winter. It's about a meter and a half tall already so in no time we'll have that scrambling through the I'm sure I'll have fun complaining and trying to keep it a good size. So behind me this is a part of the garden that we don't share too much on the videos because it's We installed these trellis as a kind of privacy screen between our The aim is to completely cover them with plants and have it be more of a Living wall instead of a fence however at the beginning of that journey it does not look very Nice but you can see I planted this rose here and again this is a single flowering rose that It's called the "Pollinator" and it'll be better for the pollinators and it'll scramble across this pretty quickly. Francis Lester and I got this one from our local garden center. It was really cheap. I think it was. About four pounds but that should cover this trellis in no time and then we've got some other Evergreen climbers on there that should provide some coverage in the winter and then you can also See behind me our new trough that we had installed yesterday and this is just to allow us to get Water for the ducks more easily so we've had the whole garden plumbed which is going to be really It's helpful. We try to use rainwater to water the plants. But for the ducks, that's not an option. So we've got this installed and then we do have another rose on this trellis I don't know the It was from someone's garden sale and it was two pounds and the label said Uh, it said pink climber grows fast so I don't know what that is but I put it on the trellis. We'll see what happens. That's more of a surprise rose. And then I'll show you the one that We've got against our potting shed just a tiny rose to show you here because again this is another The new one that went in at the beginning of spring at the end of winter this one is called Silas Manor and This one was a gift again from a friend when we got married and our friend chose this rose because Our dog's name is Silas and we named our dog Silas after the book Silas Manor we also have a dog called Epi which is another character from the book Silas Manor and my friend knew that we love David Austin roses and we love Silas our dog so she chose this for us as a wedding gift so I I really like the story behind that one and this is the first time I've seen it flower I need to Be careful that this one doesn't dry out because the shed does stop some of the rain from I'm reaching it so I have to make sure I'm watering that one but this is another one to look forward to As the weeks go by, on either side of me, we have a few more rose plants here once again. We have a trellis situation where the trellis is not covered yet it is very new it still looks a A little messy but I've put three roses in this bed there may even be more than that I think There are three that I'm trying to climb. The first one is very hard for me to pronounce the name. It's something like Felicity Perpetue. If anyone can correct me on that, I'd be very grateful. The second one I planted about two years ago and I didn't keep the tag so I'll try and find the I don't know what it is, but it's a single-flowered white rose. It's a repeat flower as well because that one seemed to bloom quite a few times last year And then thirdly another David Austin rose I believe this is another Emily Bronte it might I also messed up the labels when I put these in. It's a rose that's not a climber. It's supposed to be grown as a shrub but it doesn't really matter you can still climb them And what's happened here is I have a clematis montana and if you grow clematis montana you'll I know it very easily ties itself to things and what I found is it's pulling the rose up and kind of tying it in for me like it was a climber and if I try to prune the rose I can end I'm going to leave it for a while. And see how they behave with each other and I'll just leave them to it see what happens At the moment it looks really lovely but again it's a young plant so There aren't many flowers on there so again this is something to stay tuned for and hopefully next The new year will look as amazing as the roses at the beginning of the garden so give us a follow if you would I'd like to see how we get along. We'll keep sharing our progress in the garden with you. The way we've done our roses is planting them closer to the house at the beginning so we have something to look at as we look out the window and then over time we have been working on the bits further away from the house and then on the other side here we have two rose plants in this bed one of They're Desdemona and Desdemona doesn't look too happy right now because I moved it. It was growing in a very very shady spot and I just thought it's never going to bloom if I I moved it last week. It was hot. I had to cut a lot of it back. It was drooping a lot and it dropped a lot of its flowers so again one to stay tuned for it's a It's a really beautiful flower when it does bloom and it's a shrub rose by David Austin and then the Next rose I'm just going to read the name because I've forgotten it apparently the next rose is I'll check that in case it's not true but that's what I wrote on the I think it's a climber or a rambler and I've just been training it on some I think it'll outgrow that space because I've only had It's been in the ground since last August so less than a year and it's already put on a lot of growth So that may be one that I move to the trellis but at the moment it looks really good in the And you'll notice that these borders are a little gapy this time of year. I'm someone who focuses most of my energy on spring because I love to feel that sense of When you get through winter and then in summer I feel much happier and I don't need to spend too I've been putting a lot of energy into getting the garden in a way that will make me feel happy however it's resulted in a lot I would like to know if anyone has any suggestions on how to fill the gaps in these Most things go well here. We have quite neutral soil. The soil has enough nutrients in it. And they get a lot of sunlight. There are some shady spots where I haven't found anything. I even tried putting hellbores and foxgloves in and they haven't We're looking to add a few more roses to those gaps as well when we can. But the David Austen roses are a little more on the pricier side so we'll wait until We can get some more of those in but for now I hope you enjoyed looking around our rose garden I can't wait to show you how this looks next year and the year after gardening is such a long-term But it's really lovely that we have those flowers closer to the house that are It's already looking really big and amazing so thanks for watching give us a subscription and we'd love to share more of our garden with you