Your Dream Rose Garden is In Stock!

Most of our customers already know that I am a rose enthusiast. I have 60+ roses growing on our small 7,800SF lot in King of Prussia, the majority of which are bred by David Austin. Although roses are a higher-maintenance shrub, their beauty, fragrance and abundant blooms from late May through early December make it a must-have shrub in the Philadelphia landscape. Few landscape shrubs have the same historical significance, symbolism and wide variety of color and fragrance as the rose.

If you are dreaming of adding a rose shrub (or several!) to your garden this year, David Austin still has a number of varieties in stock that will ship to our area between March and May. There are even seven varieties in stock that are both shade tolerant and that work in a hot and humid climate. The convenient filters on the left-hand side of the webpage help ensure you find the right rose for your desired planting spot.

Did You Know? Roses were in such high demand during the seventeenth century that royalty considered roses or rose water as legal tender, and they were often used as barter and for payments.

The video above is a single stem of David Austin’s Golden Celebration cut from my garden last year. This strong cane holds up 5 large, highly fragrant flowers. Purchase Golden Celebration here. Yellow roses signify friendship and make a wonderful gift!

Beautiful Scepter’d Isle is still in stock. I absolutely adore the strong, myrrh fragrance of this rose. I wrote about it being one of my top three favorite roses in this blog post. Like me, many others love the smell of myrrh, but some noses find it terrible. Isn’t that funny? I think it smells like black licorice.

As you can tell from the video, bees love Scepter’d Isle. Because roses are a bee-friendly flower, I use insecticides as a last resort and always choose active ingredients that are the least toxic to bees. By spraying in the morning or late afternoon when bees are least active OR spraying before the flower has opened, we can mitigate harm done to our pollinators.

Princess Alexandra of Kent by David Austin and Pope John Paul II bred by Keith Zary are both wonderful performers in my garden and are in stock for you to purchase. If you look closely, you can see a small brownish spot on the leaf of PAOK. This is a fungal disease called black spot. It is prolific in our hot and humid area and none of my roses are spared from it.

Black spot is a good example of a disease that we know with certainty will affect our rose bushes. We cannot eradicate black spot completely. Instead, we can use a rotation of fungicides to suppress the disease to manageable levels that do not severely impact the appearance and health of the shrub (Severe black spot will cause the plant to defoliate. Without its leaves, chlorophyll and photosynthesis is inhibited, killing smaller feeder roots and thus weakening the shrub).

Crown Princess Margareta, Queen of Sweden, Sharifa Asma and Mary Rose, all bred by David Austin. (In stock roses are linked). As Marielle Rose, I am partial to Mary Rose. With a delicious fragrance described as “of Old Rose character with a hint of honey and almond blossom” can you really blame me?

I would be remiss not to include David Austin’s Desdemona in any post about roses. Desdemona is particularly special to me as I grew QTY: 10 of this rose in pots to line either side the aisle at our wedding last June. Although it is out of stock directly via David Austin, you can find it here. The former head gardener at the David Austin Rose Gardens in the UK countryside even said this might be his favorite DA variety!

(Please note, I have not personally ordered roses from Plant Addicts so I cannot vouch for the health of their roses).

I hope my videos and pictures may have inspired you to order a new rose for your garden this year. Growing roses has been so rewarding for me that I want you to enjoy it, too. If you decide to place an order, please let me know what you’ve picked out! I can’t wait to see a new rose growing in your garden.