ideas for landscaping your home, gardens, home improvement tips, water features & garden decoration

Planning Your Garden

If no rain follows planting, it is advisable to give some water about a week after, and a mulching of manure may then be put around each plant to afford protection from frost.

Roses must not be crowded together too closely. Standards should not be less than three feet apart, and bushes not less than one and a half to two feet.

I question whether it is ever desirable to use standards of greater height than three feet. The lanky, bent specimens one sees occasionally pointing skyward are truly ugly, and have no raison d'etre.

Standards look better in groups than in single file, though the latter arrangement may sometimes be desirable when it is intended to introduce a well-marked line.

The disposition of the plants in a rose garden is largely a matter of taste. With many beds to fill, we may devote each bed to several roses of the same color or kind, and thus get our color effect in masses. On the other hand, with a less elaborate garden, contrasting or harmonizing colors may be associated together in the same bed or border. The range of colour in roses is so great and so harmonious that one can hardly make a mistake, except perhaps in associating the magenta-tinted varieties with reds and pinks of purer hue. The former, carrying as they do a note of blue, go better side by side with whites and yellows. The presence of too large a proportion of whites is to be condemned, as they tell more strongly in the picture than colored varieties.

China roses, with their dwarf habit, beautiful foliage, and brilliant colors, should not be overlooked. They may be used in beds by themselves, in the front part of the borders, or between standards where the climate allows.

Much more is to be said about roses, for which there is not room here; and the reader specially interested had better turn to "The Amateur's Book of Roses and How to Grow Them."