The Cottage Gardener 5: 381-382 (Mar 20, 1851) ROSES FOR FLOWER-BEDS Donald Beaton No one seems to like Gloire de Rosamene for a bed; but by a particular management it makes a splendid bedder, indeed the very richest of all the roses. For bedding, this rose should be treated as a biennial, and no more; that is, to put in cuttings of it every year in April (they will root anywhere, if you stick them firm in the ground), and to plant them in the flower-bed next March, or whenever the bed is ready for them in the spring. Then, from the first of June to the end of August, every shoot which looks very strong, and is likely to run away with the sap, as gardeners say, must be stopped when it is six inches long. In this way all the shoots over a whole bed need not differ much in strength, and they will not stop from flowering in July or August, as this rose is apt to do when older plants are used. After the beds have done flowering in December, the plants must be disposed of, for all the gardeners in the country could not make a regular bed of them the second season, if the soil was ever so poor, and I do not think there is a rose known that will do better in the very poorest soil than this; and it would grow in rotten dung without any soil at all; it is no matter, therefore, for this rose where you plant it as a biennial. On thin sandy soil the plants should stand at six inches apart every way, or even thicker, and nine inches between plant and plant will not be too thick for a good bed of the richest soil, that is on the understanding that the same plants are only to flower one year on the same bed. A border of the old white China, planted round a bed of Gloire de Rosamene, thus managed, is the very best combination of rose colours I know of; and in a mild autumn both will go on flowering down to the end of November, and I have had them in good bud for bouquets in Christmas week.
One would require to be intimately acquainted with the habits of different roses on the same soil, before he could plant a mixed bed of very distinct kinds. It is for this very cause that I have so often backed out of questions which have been sent, asking us to name so many kinds for one bed. What my experience, or that of any one else, would show on a particular soil, might very easily lead a third party quite wrong in a different locality, but with the single exception of the Gloire de Rosamene, this does not hold good with the China breed of dwarf ones. For the bedding purpose, I look on the Gloire de Rosamene as a true China, although they call it a Bourbon in the catalogues. Once we get among the true Bourbons, we enter on the difficulty of making good mixtures for one bed.
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