A Rose By Any Other Name...

The queen of flowers comes in a variety of colours, scents and shapes – this handy guide will help you to decide what to plant where.

- Marie Esterhuyse

No other flower offers such a wide range of colors, forms, and sizes as roses. They are generally divided into categories according to their growth habit and bloom shape; these are the most common garden types:

Hybrid teas

If you love picking roses for your home throughout the growing season, plant a hybrid tea rose. They bloom continuously for extended periods and their long, strong stems make them excellent cut flowers. Ranging in height from 90cm to 2m, they look good in a formal rose bed or in a mixed border with companion plants such as foxgloves, delphiniums, salvias, daylilies, and irises. Their blooms can have as few as five petals, like ‘Dainty Bess’, to as many as 75. Plant them about 80cm apart to ensure that they have sufficient space to grow. ‘Just Joey’, ‘Esther Geldenhuys’, ‘Duet’ and the well-known ‘Peace’ rose are examples.

[A BIT OF HISTORY]

Tea roses were bred from two old Chinese roses, one pink and one creamy-buff with a tea scent. These two roses were sent to England at the beginning of the 19th century where they were crossed with other Chinese roses and later also with roses from other groups. This resulted in a new group of hardy repeat-flowering roses that we know today as hybrid teas.

Floribundas or cluster roses

These roses also flower for long periods, with clusters of blooms on shrubs that vary in height from 80cm to 2m. Requiring little maintenance, they add huge impact to the garden when planted together in groups. Although cluster rose blooms are never very big, the large quantity of them on each stem more than makes up for it. Place a bunch of these roses together in a vase for an informal, abundant arrangement.