A love of roses

Roses are especially loved at Longmeadow. Monty shares his favourite varieties, with advice on how to keep them blooming all summer

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It took me a while to love roses as a plant. I had always admired the flowers in the kind of knee-jerk way that most of us love sunsets or the song of a blackbird, but I had no feeling for them as plants and grew them almost because I felt that was what was required of anyone planting a 'proper' garden. Then I moved to Herefordshire and made my first big garden (as recounted in my long-out-of-print book, The Prickotty Bush).

I bought my mother-in-law a couple of roses for her birthday and became seduced by the names of the roses in the catalogue of a local nursery. They were all 'old' or 'classic' roses - gallicas, albas, damasks, mosses, centifolias, bourbons - not fashionable back then in the 1980s, and their names ran off my tongue like a floral charm, conjuring a velvety richness and fulsome sensuality that the floribundas and hybrid teas of my youth had never even hinted at.

I was hooked. So I visited the nursery - Acton Beauchamp Roses - and ordered about 50 different ones, three of each, at an absurdly cheap wholesale price of about a pound or so a rose. That summer the little stubby plants produced their first flowers, and I savoured and tried each one, as a wine buff tasting a new vintage. I was no rose buff, but a lifelong passion had begun. I devoured Peter Beales' wonderful book Classic Roses - still the best on the subject - and he became my wise rose guru and, until his untimely death, my guiding rose spirit.