AUGUST is traditional rose pruning time for highland and inland gardeners. Most of us grow at least a few bush roses (aka hybrid teas and floribundas) and these are easy enough to prune.
All that's needed is the removal of dead wood followed by clipping to outward facing buds at about knee height, to encourage new growth to carry flowers.
After initial booming you can give them a light trim - imagine you're cutting stems for indoors - and your roses should then produce a second and usually a third crop of flowers going into autumn.
Not everyone, though, wants to spend a freezing August day pruning.
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Luckily there are lots of old fashioned, shrub and species roses that flower happily from year to year with no pruning.
The double yellow banksia rose (R. banksiae lutea) often found in old country gardens is a popular example.
The main objection to these roses, apart from the size of some of them, is that they only flower once in a season.
However in the 19th century, smaller, perpetual flowering China roses were introduced to European gardens.
They became the ancestors of today's bush roses and China roses are still offered by nurseries.
Rosa chinensis mutabilis is one of my favourites. It is a loosely branching shrub, growing from the base to about 1.8 metres but as much as 3m in a favoured corner, with bronze new leaves sprouting from reddish young wood.
The single, faintly scented flowers are extraordinary as, like most China roses, instead of fading with age they actually become darker, but also mutate: flame-coloured buds open to soft buff yellow, change to coppery pink after pollination and on the third day become dark crimson. All three colours appear on the bush simultaneously.
The best flowering times are spring and autumn but R. mutabilis flowers intermittently throughout summer and in summer rainfall regions produces successive waves of bloom.
The original China rose (Rosa chinensis x spontanea, of which R. mutablis is probably a Chinese garden hybrid) was first seen by western plant hunters in north-west Sichuan where it was found mainly on dry, west facing slopes between 1560 and 1950 metres.
It's only real fault is a tendency to legginess so it's best situated at the back of a border, an ideal location for it anyway as it dislikes heavy frost.
The multi coloured flowers look beautiful with the oat-coloured flowering stems of grasses like Calamagrostis 'Karl Foerster' and Stipa gigantea, also with the tiny, pinky buff flowers and large, felty grey, oak shaped leaves of plume poppy (Macleaya cordata).
They are lovely too with purple foliage, one of the purple leaved berberises, or purple Smoke Bush 'Grace'. Salvias, sedums and catmint do a good foreground job.
On its own, R. mutabilis makes an attractive low hedge, but only away from a boundary fence - stock love snacking on a tasty rose bush, prickles and all.
All roses benefit from fertiliser in late winter, either compost, blood and bone or rotted animal manure.
R. chinensis mutabilis is available from Treloar Roses.
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