Garden Centre

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Christmas roses

It’s very odd, but one thing that you can rely on, or at least I can, is my Iceberg rose producing at least one flower in time for Christmas. It’s an amazingly hardy rose, very suitable for beginners and the one rose I would recommend for anybody who has problems growing other roses. Here's mine in full summer flower.

It’s sold as both a free climber or a standard floribunda and it’s the climber that seems to always give Christmas gifts. The RHS says it bears medium-sized, white blooms, starting from shapely pink-tinted buds, (which) appear very freely almost all season. Hmmm. At any season, would be my judgement.

In my life I’ve had three Iceberg roses in three houses, two were pinkish in bud form, one wasn’t. One of the pink budding ones was lightly scented, neither of the others were. When you buy, it sometimes says that Iceberg is lightly scented and sometimes unscented – weird. The floribunda is more likely to be scented, as far as I can tell from decades of sniffing other people’s roses.

But honestly, although I think a flower without fragrance is like a dog without a tail, if you can cut a rosebud from your garden on Christmas Day, it really would be asking too much to have it scenting the house as well.

Labels: iceberg rose, RHS, winter flowers, winter rose

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:30 AM

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