We went to Sangerhausen for the first time this weekend. We picked a bad time to be sure; we went rather too late for the old roses; they are still blooming here in Hamburg, but Sangerhausen is a good deal further south and obviously has a warmer climate. Also it had been raining for some days and many old roses were full of balled flowers. On some Hybrid Teas they had the size of tennis balls. Impressive in a way, but not necessarily beautiful.
Sangerhausen is surely astonishing. They boast over 8,000 varieties and I certainly came across some roses I had never seen or heard of before. In a way though it was not as we expected. It's a huge park to be sure, but there is very little landscaping done with the roses. Mostly there are in rectangular beds, row upon row of rose on bare earth. Certainly a common way to display Hybrid Teas or Floribundas, but here it's the same with climbers and even ramblers. They just grow on poles planted in rows. It looks like a rose plantation. We were here two days and I don't think I've seen a single rambler growing into a tree, and very few climbers on arches.
On the other hand the display is not very systematic either, at least not on a grand scale. Certainly roses of the same class are often grouped together--there are clusters of beds with Bourbons or Albas or Gallicas, or of Tea Roses etc.--but it's almost as if successive generations of maintainers of this rosarium tried the idea again and again in different places. So there are some Gallicas near the one entrance, and some near another, and then a huge field of Gallicas off in one corner, etc. Some classes seem to have been particularly popular with the makers of this garden, so they're all over the place; I noticed this especially with Wichuraiana Hybrids and with Hybrid Perpetuals.
As far as we noticed, there is no way to find a particular rose except to buy a rather expensive printed directory which might be handy if you live nearby, but not for us. One would think in the 21st century there might be something like a website or a computer where the visitor could get a detailed plan or directory. The folding map one gets at the entrance is so schematic as to be useless for anything except finding one's way to the restaurant.
Often the roses are in very large groups in beds of bare earth which you are asked not to step upon so not to compress the soil. Reasonable, no doubt, but how do you appreciate, or even identify, that particular rose that grows in the third row four meters from the path with the label completely overgrown at its foot? I must confess we sometimes ignored the plea and did step into the beds. Afterall, what's the use of a rose garden when you can't even see the rose, let alone get a whiff of its scent?