Get Colour For Months With Repeat-Flowering Roses

Shrub or climber, compact or lax – ensure optimum value and enjoyment with varieties that deliver more bloom for your buck. Graham Clarke reveals the top performers

- Graham Clarke

There are roses… and then there are roses! A couple of centuries ago, when these summer charmers first became the must-have plants for any self-respecting British garden, most roses were ‘once-flowering’, making an appearance solely in June/July, with a single flush of blooms that lasted for several weeks. The odd flower would sometimes pop up in late summer or autumn, but these were too sporadic to be considered a ‘second flush’.

These were the roses that dominated gardens until around 80 or so years ago when the new, highly dramatic (but also single-flush) hybrid tea and floribunda bush types became incredibly popular.

More recently, however, a growing number of gardeners have started seeking out options with a longer season of bloom, and luckily there are shrub, climber and rambler roses that can deliver just that. Most nurseries call them simply ‘repeat-flowerers’, but occasionally you’ll see certain roses listed by their official descriptive terms: ‘recurrent’ and ‘remontant’. The distinction is quite subtle; while the former produces regular flowers over the summer, in a continuous process of bud formation, varieties of the latter offer successive bursts of blooms throughout the season.

Hit hybrids