At its peak, on a late June evening in the Rose Garden, you still feel like you’ve walked into a bowl of potpourri – or not quite potpourri because it’s something fresher, juicier and more vegetable than that. From the flat severity of the York stone paths roses undulate in every direction, some tall and columnar, others quiet and petite, with the odd massive virtual tents of flowers – three bushes trained into one. They are all in full bloom at much the same time, and particularly at dawn and dusk, when there’s greater moisture in the air, their abundance and scent stop you dead.
That’s just what Vita wanted.
VITA’S TOP SHRUB ROSES
‘Drunk on roses, I look round and wonder which to recommend.’
Rosa alba ‘Great Maiden’s Blush’
Vita writes: ‘[Rosa alba] sounds as though it were invariably a white rose. Make no mistake. The adjective is misleading … the alba roses include many forms which are not white but pink … Great Maiden’s Blush [is] a very pretty and innocent-looking pink and white debutante … she holds her flowers longer than most. This is a very beautiful old rose, many-petalled, of an exquisite shell-pink clustering among the grey-green foliage, extremely sweet-scented, and for every reason perfect for filling a squat bowl indoors. In the garden she is not squat at all, growing 6 to 7 ft high and wide in proportion, thus demanding a good deal of room, perhaps too much in a small border but lovely and reliable to fill a stray corner … The albas … tolerate difficult situations, thriving in soil penetrated by the roots of trees (such as in woodland walks); they are resistant to mildew; and they can either be pruned or left un-pruned, according to the taste of the grower, the space available, and the time that can be devoted to them.’
Rosa gallica ‘Complicata’
This rose, as Vita says in More for Your Garden, has a ‘graceful untidiness’, which is just what Vita’s style is all about. It’s ‘a perfect rose-pink’ with ‘enormous single flowers borne all the length of the very long sprays. I cannot think why it should be called complicata, for it has a simplicity and purity of line which might come straight out of a Chinese drawing. This is a real treasure, if you can give it room to toss itself about as it likes; and whether you lightly stake it upright or allow it to trail must depend upon how you feel about it. Personally I think that its graceful untidiness is part of its charm, but whatever you do with it you can depend upon it to fill any corner with its renewed surprise in June.’ There is still a Rosa complicata in the garden, and more are being added.
Rosa ‘Complicata’.
Rosa ‘Grandmaster’
This one is a ‘hybrid musk … which would associate well as a bush planted in front of either Lawrence Johnstone or Le Rêve [see climbers, p. 000]. This is an exquisite thing, a great improvement on the other hybrid musk, Buff Beauty, though that in all conscience is lovely enough. Grandmaster is nearly single, salmon-coloured on the outside and a very pale gold within, scentless, alas, which one does not expect of a musk, but that fault must be overlooked for the extreme beauty of the bush spattered all over as it were with large golden butterflies. These shrubby roses are invaluable, giving so little trouble and filling so wide an area at so little cost.’
Rosa moyesii
This is a very important rose at Sissinghurst, and one that Vita picked out to write about in Some Flowers. She used it to extend the colour in her Purple Border out from blue and purple and towards some rich pinks and dusky reds, including this one. There are two plants in the Top Courtyard, both put there by Vita and still healthy and vigorous growers. That’s a pretty good testament to this species.
‘This is a Chinese rose, and looks it,’ she writes. ‘If ever a plant reflected all that we had ever felt about the delicacy, lyricism, and design of a Chinese drawing, Rosa Moyesii is that plant. We might well expect to meet her on a Chinese printed paper-lining to a tea-chest of the time of Charles II, when wall-papers first came to England, with a green parrot out of all proportion, perching on her slender branches. There would be no need for the artist to stylise her, for Nature has already stylised her enough. Instead, we meet her more often springing out of our English lawns, or overhanging our English streams, yet Rosa Moyesii remains for ever China. With that strange adaptability of true genius she never looks out of place. She adapts herself as happily to cosy England as to the rocks and highlands of Asia.
‘“Go, lovely rose.” She goes indeed, and quickly. Three weeks at most sees her through her yearly explosion of beauty. But her beauty is such that she must be grown for the sake of those three weeks in June. During that time her branches will tumble with the large, single, rose-red flower of her being. It is of an indescribable colour. I hold a flower of it here in my hand now, and find myself defeated in description. It is like the colour I imagine Petra to be, if one caught it at just the right moment of sunset. It is like some colours in a rug from Isfahan. It is like the dyed leather sheath of an Arab knife – and this I do know for certain, for I am matching one against the other, the dagger-sheath against the flower. [This knife is still in Vita’s desk drawer.] It is like all those dusky rose-red things which abide in the mind as a part of the world of escape and romance.
‘Then even when the flowers are gone the great graceful branches are sufficiently lovely in themselves. Consider that within three or four years a single bush will grow some twelve feet high and will cover an area six to eight feet wide; long waving wands of leaves delicately set and of an exquisite pattern, detaching themselves against the sky or the hedge or the wall, wherever you happen to have set it. Never make the mistake of trying to train it tight against a wall: it likes to grow free, and to throw itself loosely into the fountains of perfect shape it knows so well how to achieve. Do not, by the way, make the mistake either of industriously cutting off the dead heads, in the hope of inducing a second flowering. You will not get your second flowering and you will only deprive yourself of the second crop which it is preparing to give you: the crop of long bottle-shaped, scarlet hips of the autumn. Preserve them at all costs, these sealing-wax fruits which will hang brighter than the berries of the holly … We already have the variety called Geranium, of stockier growth, and the beautiful white Nevada, which is not a chance seedling but a deliberate cross.’
Rosa mundi (correctly, R. gallica ‘Versicolor’)
This is still grown, lightly staked, in the Rose Garden.
‘Striped and splotched and blotted,’ Vita writes again in Some Flowers, ‘this fine old rose explodes into florescence in June, giving endless variations of her markings. You never know what form these markings are going to take. Sometimes they come in red orderly stripes, sometimes in splashes, sometimes in mere stains and splotches, but always various, decorative, and interesting. They remind one of red cherry juice generously stirred into a bowl of cream. A bush of Rosa Mundi in full flowering is worth looking at. It is not worth cutting for the house unless you have the leisure to renew your flower-vases every day, for in water it will not last. Even out of doors, blooming on its own bush, it does not last for very long. It is a short-lived delight, but during the short period of its blooming it makes up in quantity what it lacks in durability …
Rosa gallica ‘Versicolor’.
‘Perhaps all the foregoing makes it sound rather unsatisfactory and not worthwhile. On the contrary, it is very much worthwhile indeed. For one thing, you can stick it in any odd corner, and indeed you will be wise to do so, unless you have a huge garden where you can afford blank gaps during a large part of the year. You can also grow it as a hedge, and let it ramp away.
‘A word as to pruning … Rosa Mundi needs all weak shoots to be cut out after the flowering time is over, and in the spring the remaining shoots should be shortened to within half a dozen buds.’
Rosa ‘Mutabilis’, or Rosa ‘Turkestanica’
Mutabilis means ‘liable to change’ in Latin, a characteristic of this rose, which opens pink and gradually fades to a sort of apricot. You’ll see both colours on a bush at one time. As with many of the Chi
na roses (such as ‘Comtesse du Cayla’, which Vita also loved and picked for the house (see here)), this flowers lightly for almost six months. It’s hugely useful and looks wonderful against red brick. In August 1952 Vita writes: ‘This makes an amusing bush, five to six feet high and correspondingly wide, covered throughout the summer with single flowers in different colours, yellow, dusky red, and coppery, all out at the same time. It is perhaps a trifle tender, and thus a sheltered corner will suit this particular harlequin.’
Rosa ‘Nevada’
This was one of Vita’s favourite roses which she had planted right at the edge of the path in Delos, so she could see it with the Tower standing behind it in the background.
‘This is not a climber,’ she notes in In Your Garden, ‘but a shrubby type, forming an arching bush up to seven or eight feet in height, smothered with great single white flowers with a centre of golden stamens. One of its parents was the Chinese species rose Moyesii, which created a sensation when it first appeared and has now become well known … The grievance against Moyesii is that it flowers only once, in June; but Nevada, unlike Moyesii, has the advantage of flowering at least twice during the summer, in June and again in August, with an extra trickle of odd flowers right into the autumn. One becomes confused among the multitude of roses, I know, but Nevada is really so magnificent that you cannot afford to overlook her. A snowstorm in summer, as her name implies. And so little bother. No pruning; no staking; no tying. And nearly as thornless as dear old Zéphyrine Drouhin. No scent, I am afraid; she is for the eye, not for the nose.’
Rosa ‘Tuscany’
‘Tuscany’ is the epitome of the sort of rose that Vita delighted in. It’s plush velvet in all its parts – it has deep crimson petals with a whorl of golden anthers at their heart, and a sweet, intense, classic rose perfume. It’s quite a healthy rose too – I’ve had it in my organic rose trial in a partially shaded spot now for five years, and it does not get blackspot. There are still several bushes of this in the Rose Garden.
‘Tuscany opens flat (being only semi-double),’ Vita says, ‘thus revealing the quivering and dusty gold of its central perfection … It is more like the heraldic Tudor rose than any other. The petals, of the darkest crimson, curl slightly inwards and the anthers, which are of a rich yellow, shiver and jingle loosely together if one shakes the flower.
‘The velvet rose. What a combination of words! One almost suffocates in their soft depths, as though one sank into a bed of rose-petals, all thorns ideally stripped away. No photograph can give any idea of what it is really like. Photographs make it look merely funereal – too black, almost a study in widow’s crêpe. They make the flower and the leaf appear both of the same dark colour, which is unfair to so exquisite a thing.
‘As like Rosa Mundi, Tuscany is a Gallica, it needs the same kind of pruning; it will never make a very tall bush, and your effort should be to keep it shapely – not a very easy task, for it tends to grow spindly shoots, which must be rigorously cut out. Humus and potash benefit the flowers and the leaves respectively.’
Rosa ‘William Lobb’ – the Moss rose
Another classic Vita rose with extraordinary colouring – properly purple, then fading a little like a tapestry or embroidered cushion. It also has excellent scent:
‘As they reach the stage where some of the flowers are passing while others are still coming out, they look as though some rich ecclesiastical vestment had been flung over them. The dull carnation of the fresh flowers accords so perfectly with the slaty lilac of the old, and the bunches cluster in such profusion, that the whole bush becomes a cloth of colour, sumptuous, as though stained with blood and wine. If they are to be grown in a border, I think they should be given some grey-leaved plant in front of them, such as Stachys lanata (more familiarly, Rabbits’ Ears), for the soft grey accentuates their own musty hues, but ideally speaking, I should like to see a small paved garden with grey stone walls given up to them entirely, with perhaps a dash of the old rose prettily called Veilchenblau (violet-blue) climbing the walls and a few clumps of the crimson clove carnation at their feet.’
Rosa ‘Ulrich Brunner’
In Vita’s view this is one of the best Hybrid Perpetuals, useful for prolonging the season and lasting well in water. It was one of the first roses the gardener Jack Vass experimented on with his new rose-training technique (see here). ‘Ulrich Brunner’ is ‘stiff-stemmed, almost thornless, cherry-red in colour, very prolific indeed, a real cut-and-come-again … Ulrich Brunner, Frau Karl Druschki, and the Dicksons, Hugh and George, are very suitable for this kind of training. The hybrid perpetuals can also be used as wall plants; not nearly so tall as true climbers and ramblers, they are quite tall enough for, say, a space under a ground floor window; or they may be grown on post-and-wire as espaliers outlining a path.’
TRAINING SHRUB ROSES
What looks like unbridled profusion in the Sissinghurst roses relies on meticulous work behind the scenes early in the year, when precision horticulture guarantees that wonderful romantic effect. It’s well worth visiting the garden at the beginning of the growing season, when the bare bones – the beautiful, intricate webs of rose stems without their leaves – are clearly visible, so you can see how the gardeners do it. This rose-training system originated at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire with the Astors’ head gardener Jack Vass, who moved to Sissinghurst in 1939. Other National Trust properties now send their gardeners to Sissinghurst to learn the ingenious technique. We know how devoted Vita was to her roses, but it was Jack Vass who started to grow them in this exceptional way.
Shrub roses trained on to hazel benders, in the characteristic Sissinghurst way.
All roses can be encouraged to produce more flowering side-shoots if their stems are trained as nearly horizontal as possible. If you put every stem of a rose plant under pressure, bending and stressing it, the rose will flower more prolifically. The plant’s biochemistry is telling the bush it’s on its way out and so needs to make as many flowers as possible.
They should be pruned before they come into leaf to prevent leaf buds and shoots from being damaged as their stems are manipulated, so do this in the winter or early spring. Depending on their habit, shrub roses are trained in one of three ways.
First, the tall, rangy bushes with stiffer branches – such as ‘Charles de Mills’, ‘Ispahan’, ‘Gloire de France’, ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’ and ‘Camayeux’ – are twirled up a frame of four chestnut or hazel poles. Every pruned tip is bent and attached to a length below.
Second, the big leggy shrubs, which put out great, pliable, triffid arms that are easy to tie down and train, are bent on to hazel hoops arranged around the skirts of the plant. Roses with this lax habit include ‘Constance Spry’, ‘Fantin-Latour’, ‘Zéphirine Drouhin’, ‘Madame Isaac Pereire’, ‘Coupe d’Hébé’, ‘Henri Martin’ and ‘Souvenir du Docteur Jamain’.
In Even More for Your Garden, Vita comments in September 1957: ‘These strong growers lend themselves to various ways of treatment. They can be left to reach their free height of 7 to 8 ft., but then they wobble about over eye-level and you can’t see them properly, with the sun in your eyes, also they get shaken by summer gales. A better but more laborious system is to tie them down to benders, by which I mean flexible wands of hazel with each end poked firmly into the ground and the rose-shoots tied down at intervals, making a sort of half-hoop. This entails a lot of time and trouble, but is satisfactory if you can do it; also it means that the rose breaks at each joint, so that you get a very generous floraison, a lovely word I should like to see imported from the French into our language. If you decide to grow hybrid perpetuals on this system of pegging them down, you ought to feed them richly, with organic manure if you can get it, or with compost if you make it, but anyhow with something that will compensate for the tremendous effort they will put out from being encouraged to break all along their shoots. You can’t ask everything of a plant, any more than you can exact everything of a human being, without giving
some reward in return. Even the performing seal gets an extra herring.’
Under Pam and Sybille the technique was refined. All the old and diseased wood is removed and then, stem by stem, last year’s wood is bent over and tied onto the hazel hoop. You start at the outside of the plant and tie that in first, then move towards the middle, using the plant’s own branches to build up the web and – in the case of ‘Constance Spry’ and ‘Henri Martin’ – create a fantastic height, one layer domed and attached to the one below. Without any sign of a flower, this looks magnificent as soon as it’s complete, and in a couple of months each stem, curved almost to ground level, will flower abundantly.
The third method of training shrub roses applies to the contained, well behaved, less prolific varieties (‘Petite de Hollande’, ‘Madame Knorr’, ‘Chapeau de Napoléon’ (or Rosa × centifolia ‘Cristata’) and those that produce branches too stiff to bend (‘Felicia’ and the newish David Austin rose, ‘William Shakespeare 2000’), and these are tackled slightly differently. They are pruned hard, then each bush is attached with twine to a single stake cut to about the height of the pruned bush. Without the stake, even these would topple under the weight of their summer growth.
OTHER SUMMER-FLOWERING SHRUBS
Roses were the dominant flowering shrubs for Vita’s summer garden, and rightly so, but she had a few other beauties, good recommendations still worth taking seriously today.
In her new White Garden she planted the huge, crinkly white-bloomed romneya, or Californian tree poppy, a flowering but not woody shrub, more like an evergreen perennial – and it’s still there. It takes a while to get established, but after three or four years will flower prolifically and will last for decades. My mother grows lots of it in her garden outside Cambridge and it’s been there now for almost fifty years. Vita describes it in In Your Garden:
‘A beautiful thing in flower in July is the Californian tree-poppy. It is not exactly an herbaceous plant; you can call it a sub-shrub if you like; whatever you call it will make no difference to its beauty.
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