Gardening Tip-December

While visions of sugar plums dance in your head this holiday season, you might want to take some time envisioning how the AARS 2001 winners Sun Sprinkles, Marmalade Skies and Glowing Peace can fit into your rose garden next spring.

Now is the perfect time to start thinking about planning your garden - at least on paper. You may not be able to dig up the dirt, but you can dig up some great catalogues, including the 2001 Winners Brochure - showcasing the newest award-winning rose varieties - now available on this AARS site.

Perusing through plant catalogues or garden books is a great way to pass long winter days and make the unspring like weather seem more bearable. Check out the latest garden planning books, guides and computer software. Some recommended books include "Rose Gardening" (1995, Meredith Books, Garden Books) and "Successful Rose Gardening" (1993, Meredith Books, Garden Books).

From the most informal to formal gardens, planning is the most important step toward ensuring a fabulous display of roses. Start looking around your house or lawn for areas that lend themselves to beautiful rose displays. AARS offers its own ideas for designing gardens with different types of roses in various home settings, including rose beds, hedges, patios, walkways and driveways.

Always keep in mind that it's important to select the appropriate roses to match the garden locations you choose, or select locations that are well suited to the sunlight, soil, moisture and growing needs of the particular varieties of roses you want to grow.

Next, try something as simple as sketching on paper what you would like your garden to look like. It might be helpful to use photographs from books or pictures you've taken of gardens you find particularly attractive. Include your house or other fixtures, trees and shrubs in your sketches. You might even try adding colors to your sketches of roses to match the rich shades of the AARS varieties you choose. Incorporate layers of roses or combine roses with companion plants and flowers and garden fixtures, which add color, texture and shape to the display space.

Consider that just like a landscape painting, your garden should draw the eye through a foreground, a middle area and into the background. More formal in nature, square or rectangular beds are perfect for long-stem hybrid teas but can also incorporate miniatures and even climbers. For edging the beds, clipped dwarf boxwood, dwarf lavender and catmint all are options.

Informal rose gardens are most dependent on natural shapes and plant groupings. Symmetry is less important than curves, balance, color, texture and variety. In an informal garden, your roses will be the focal points, with tree lines, shrubbery borders and walls as backdrops. Shrub roses and floribundas are ideal for low-maintenance informal gardens. Plants that make great companions include the Iris, day lily, lavender, veronica, delphinium and heliopsis.

In all planning efforts for creating a unified and artistic garden, try to always remember the six basic principles of design: repetition, variety, balance, emphasis, sequence and scale.

Take notes or keep a record of your design plans so you can easily add new or different elements for each planting season.

.With permission from the AARS