Recent weeks have brought to gardening the bliss-filled gift of working bathed in wave after wave of floral fragrance.
An old honeysuckle growing beside a gate into the back garden grew to twice its usual volume in this spring of overgrowth, to put on a massive, sweet-scented show of flowers over several weeks.
Equally profuse of bloom have been the roses. Situated strategically throughout a garden, they bless the landscape and the working gardener with beauty, colour, and frequent drifts of uplifting aromas.
The house is currently perfumed with roses and sweet peas. I cut both flowers weekly, early in the morning. The sweet peas go into an old smoked-glass vase that my mother used for my father鈥檚 sweet peas, grown on the wire caging of an empty chicken coop in our backyard.
It is a summer to celebrate roses and enjoy their broad and beautiful range of scents. Russell Nursery in North Saanich reports an increased interest over the last couple of years in growing roses 鈥� perhaps, they say, because of the superior disease resistance, continuous or repeat bloom, and good fragrance of modern roses.
The nursery sells David Austin鈥檚 English Roses 鈥� an ever-growing and improving selection of roses bred to combine the full rosette or cup shape, fragrance, and general characteristics of Old Roses with the wide colour range and repeat flowering of more modern roses such as the Hybrid Teas and Floribundas. The intention from the beginning was to produce roses that are superior to听both types. This year, a magnificent update on the finest English Roses was published.
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The English Roses: Classic Favorites and New Selections, by David Austin (Firefly Books, 320 pages, hardcover, $49.95).
This third edition of The English Roses is a visual treat as 400 photos of rose garden vistas and exquisite individual roses reach out to enchant.
The heart of the book is Part Two: A Gallery of English Roses 鈥� 鈥渢hose we regard as the best varieties we have bred to date.鈥� They are divided into groups, among them Old Rose Hybrids, English Musk Roses and Climbing English Roses.
With the climbers is 鈥楾he Generous Gardener,鈥� 鈥渙ur most important English Climber up to the present time.鈥� The plant, which can be grown as a climber or large shrub, bears soft pink, cup-shaped blooms with 鈥渁 delicious fragrance with aspects of Old Rose, Musk, and myrrh.鈥�
Introduced in 2011, 鈥榃illiam and Catherine鈥� was named to celebrate the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in April that year. The classic, shallow, cup-shaped white flowers, full-petalled like many Old Roses, have a strong fragrance of听鈥減ure myrrh.鈥�
The last of the rose groups, 鈥淪ome Earlier English roses,鈥� includes the one English Rose in my garden 鈥� Heritage (1984), described as having 鈥渃harming cup-shaped flowers鈥� in soft pink. 鈥淎n old favourite but now not quite up to standard.鈥�
A chapter on fragrance delves into the complexities and elusiveness of scents in roses. Basic scents such as Old Rose, Musk, and Fruit are identified and described.
Austin tells the story of his rose breeding over the years, starting in the 1950s when he began cross-fertilizing a Gallica rose with a Floribunda to produce his first variety: Constance Spry (1961). Breeding continues at the Austin family rose nursery and gardens at Albrighton in Shropshire. The gardens, containing over 800 rose varieties, are pictured in听the book and their layout is sketched. More than 1.2 million roses are grown for sale yearly at听the nursery.
GARDEN EVENTS
HCP programs. The following are upcoming programs at the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific, 505 Quayle Rd. in Saanich. To register, please call 250-479-6162. hcp.ca
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鈥� Registration is open for the 2018 Master Gardener course, a 13-week program that runs on Thursday evenings 6 to 9 p.m. and Sunday mornings 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. from February until May. Participants will learn from top instructors and guest speakers about soils, plant identification, pruning, food production and more. Cost is $745.
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鈥� Registration is open for the 2018 Year Round Harvest program with Linda Gilkeson. Linda covers everything from seeding to harvesting food plants in 10 monthly, Sunday-afternoon classes from January to October. Cost to HCP members $545, others $695.
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鈥� Volunteers are needed for the Arts & Music in the Gardens event on Aug. 26 and 27. Shifts last three to four hours. Volunteers have free entry for the weekend. For more information or to volunteer, email at [email protected].