Walk on the wild side with rambling roses

What an amazing year for roses: we have never had such size, persistence and abundance of flower in my entire lifetime. Their first flush is fading, but I cannot let it pass without another tribute, following one last month. I am not the first to respond, like roses, with a repeat performance.

“One sets out with the intention of writing about something else,” wrote Vita Sackville-West in the 1950s, looking out in June on superb roses in her garden at Sissinghurst Castle, “and then one’s pen takes charge because one has suddenly noticed some rose whose beauty has come to maturity and is doing its stuff as never before.” My column was nearly about strawberries but roses took charge of it. It is a ramble about roses rambling at their best.

Why, first, have roses been so stunning since late May? One explanation put to me is that they loved the cold winter. I totally disagree. The winter killed off chunks of old stems on many varieties.

I ascribe their starry performance to the rain in late spring and the absence of spring frost. It is not just that there have been so many flowers held for so long until the dry weather eventually became too hot. Individual flowers have been bigger than usual, not just on modern varieties such as Gertrude Jekyll but on older ones too, including the pink Ispahan, once-flowering but finely scented, whose origins go back before 1832.

On June 22, my rambling roses looked wonderful. White-flowered Rambling Rector was flowering all over the conifer hedges on the boundaries of my Old Vicarage; Treasure Trove, a seedling of the rampant white Kiftsgate, was covered in cream-apricot clusters above my primary viewing point, a garden seat; the little-known Mrs Honey Dyson had rambled over half of the vicarage’s roof, carpeting it in peach-cream. On impulse, I wanted to compare others’ results, so I set off on a ramble of my own. I headed off for the National Collection of Rambler Roses, from which I will share four fine ramblers chosen by its owners from hundreds more. I will also share some thoughts about wilding and about national collections, ones that occurred to me on site.

At Moor Wood, near Cirencester, Henry Robinson and his wife Susie have built a National Collection of rambling roses since 1982. They began with an exquisite stone-built farmhouse whose facade was constructed in a Georgian style as late as 1830. In the past 100 years, the garden has followed a four-two-one pattern: Henry’s grandparents ran it with four full-time gardeners, his parents with two, and he and Susie were able to have only one. The site is 800ft up, spanning two hillsides, and the soil is stony Cotswold brash, an affliction I share at home. The Robinsons decided to run this challenge as a landscape rather than a fully weeded garden: wilding is the buzz of the moment but it is not an invention of the past 10 years.

“I’m a grumpy old tractor driver,” Henry tried to persuade me, whereas Susie is certainly the opposite: she worked for many years at an interior decorating company, and her elegant, country style is exemplified in Moor Wood’s peaceful inner rooms. The garden’s surrounding farm covers about 1,000 acres, a source of ample manure for the roses. When not on his tractor, Henry plants, prunes and prowls, applying light-touch management to more than 150 varieties of rambling roses.

In the fine rose garden at Parc de Bagatelle in Paris, I have watched the gardeners guillotining the long growths of climbing and rambling roses immediately after flowering in July. They even cut them back to their supporting ropes. At Moor Wood, the Robinsons time the pruning similarly, cutting out long stems immediately after others have flowered. Take the hint: ramblers should not then be pruned again in winter.

“All ramblers are climbers,” says an authoritative booklet from the Historic Roses Group, but “not all climbers are ramblers”: ramblers are mostly marked out by small flowers born in profusion and by long, thin stems that can be bent or trained or cut off in July. Actually, ramblers, like climbing roses, do not naturally climb. Even those that are thorny have to be held up by wires fixed into a wall behind them.

The Robinsons began their collection because ramblers, usually flowering once, were being overlooked by gardeners who wanted roses to flower all year. Henry scoured catalogues and gained from private presents: some of his best varieties came from France and Germany, including René André with lovely small apricot-pink flowers, and the unusual Erinnerung an Brod, which is a fine double violet-purple. Roses from France and Germany can now be imported only with complex post-Brexit permits and fees: the Robinsons have given up the struggle.

I ascribe their starry performance to the rain in late spring and the absence of spring frost

Post Brexit, other National Collections of plants will surely become more narrowly national, a loss.

On the walls by the house, the lovely Phyllis Bide, a long-flowering rambler, runs near an entwined couple of whites, Brenda Colvin and Sir Cedric Morris. They are a superb pair, but their namesakes would never have entwined outside the rose garden: Brenda Colvin was a tweedy landscape planner whose hair was kept in a bun by hairpins, whereas Morris was the king of Benton End, his home in Suffolk, where he painted and fostered a free gay lifestyle, even in the 1950s. At Moor Wood many of the ramblers, like Brenda and Cedric, have been left free and allowed to spread outwards into wide clumps or to tumble over walls and in front of stone buildings. Between the second and third weeks in June, the flowers span 50 shades of white and pink but a few come in deeper colours and yellows. The garden is open to visitors during those weeks.

From the start, the Robinsons had a wild style in mind. When ramblers spread, they exclude weeds. When they flower, they draw the eye away from unkept surrounds. They need minimal maintenance and give maximal returns. Among the rare rose Blushing Lucy and the forgotten pink Dr W Van Fleet, I looked out to great fountains of white Purity and wreaths of pink-white Princesse Louise and realised a rose-tinted truth: the admired Piet Oudolf’s perennial “naturalistic” plantings never have roses spraying far and wide among them. What a drab mistake: widely spaced ramblers wild a garden with beauty on the grand scale.

Name four favourites, I begged the collection’s maestro. He winced and came up with the yellowish to cream Ghislaine de Féligonde, a smaller-growing rose whose main enemy is its cumbrous name; Debutante, a small flowered rose-pink with a long season; Ethel, whose cupped pale pink flowers are later than most to open; and white Janet B Wood, very vigorous and no longer easy to find.

The soil is no good for most bush roses and the cold on the hillsides is unmoderated. Maintenance happens whenever the Robinsons have the time and will. The results are a ramble in heaven. “When would you date your roses’ first really good year?” I asked Henry, their planter since 1982. “I think probably next year,” he replied. Moor Wood’s roses do not have heavy clay soil and winter pruning but they certainly run on optimism.

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on Twitter or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram