If you are a novice gardener and you want to start a rose garden, you can certainly buy a few roses at the nursery, plant them and hope for the best. But you might risk becoming one of those gardeners who complain they took their roses out because they were too hard to grow. A rose garden does not exist in a vacuum.
A successful rose garden includes analysis and planning. You need to consider rose selection, garden design and the fundamentals of rose care. Selecting the right rose takes research and thoughtful deliberations and decisions. The market is loaded with choices, and not all roses perform equally well in every region of the country or county. We definitely want roses that give us lots of beautiful blooms, but we also want our roses to be disease resistant and grow vigorously.
A good starting point is to check the AGRS website, americangardenroseselections. Also, for trouble-free and healthy roses that have undergone rigorous field testing, check the Earth-kind website, aggie-horticulture. I live on the coast, so in the early spring and late fall, some of these roses are more prone to develop black spot, rust and botrytis than they are in drier inland areas.
Periodically, I need to manually remove problem leaves and blooms, but I can still grow these roses without the use of any fungal sprays. But inland areas have their own woes. Hot summers and Santa Ana winds can crisp up blooms and cause sunburnt canes. Visit private and public gardens to see which roses grow best in your location and contact the consulting rosarians at the San Diego Rose Society to get suggestions for roses that perform best in your area of San Diego County.
Placement: Roses lend themselves to many garden situations because they vary in size inch miniatures to foot ramblers , growth habit, shape and color. Our gardens shine when we include roses, but to achieve our landscape goals, we must determine whether the size and attributes of the rose we select complement the space and placement in our garden.
