Just Joey: it's just showy | Fiona's Garden

Shorter days, cooler nights and lovely subsoil moisture have brought on a richness and depth of colour rarely seen in early summer.

Some of mine are into their third flowering, though I'm not holding my breath, frost is never far off for highland and inland gardeners.

Changing the design of our front garden last winter forced me to decide whether I wanted to keep growing roses.

Related reading:

They didn't belong in the new layout of rocks, grasses, succulents and low ground covers.

On the other hand they'd survived the horror season of 2019/20 astonishingly well and it seemed somehow ungrateful to give them away.

One good thing about gardening on a farm, there's usually space for a new planting scheme.

I found a neglected, north-facing corner leading round to an overgrown bank, so I cut everything back, cleared the weeds, dug over the ground and gave my ageing roses a new home.

In anticipation of another summer of discontent I dug in compost and humus and blanketed the beds with hay, but this year nature was on my side.

My roses grew at manic speed and have flowered on and off since November.

I love peachy, buff-gold roses so hybrid tea 'Just Joey' is a special favourite: heat resistant, amazingly free of black spot even in this rainy season, spicily fragrant and perpetually in flower.

Lovely with blue salvia 'African Skies', white tobacco flowers and an 'Autumn Joy' sedum that came up when I wasn't looking.

'Perle d'Or' has similar, peachy-buff-apricot colouring but with smaller flowers, more like ever popular 'Cecile Brunner' but flowering continuously if kept dead headed, and heavily scented.

These colours are lovely among dark red, so I planted the roses next to my old favourite, velvety dark crimson 'Josephine Bruce', a strongly scented, repeat flowering hybrid tea.

'Mr. Lincoln' and David Austin's Othello, also velvety deep red would be beautiful too, or you could put climbing 'Guinee' (four to five metres) the blackest crimson of all, on a nearby wall or trellis.

Strong colours last well in strong sunshine, which often seems to drain the colour from paler roses.

Hybrid teas 'Chicago Peace' and Swane's 'Heart of Gold' hold their sunset red and gold shades well and are heat resistant and long-flowering, though mine have succumbed to black spot this year.

I've long been a sucker (sorry) for striped roses.

Ten years ago I picked up a couple of el cheapo, end of season 'Cabana', a low growing, black-spot resistant bush rose with clusters of sweet-smelling blooms striped in red, pink and white with a hint of gold, prettier than it sounds.

Research has shown that bees are significantly more attracted to striped roses than to those with plain petals, as good a reason as any to include a few stripes in your rose garden.

Swane's Nurseries (www.swanes.com/) supply 'Heart of Gold'. Treloars (www.treloarroses.com.au) and Ross Roses (www.rossroses.com.au) offer a wide range of roses by mail order, including all the above. Garden centres carry bare rooted roses from May to August.

Love agricultural news? Sign up for The Land's free daily newsletter.