Creating an English Rose Garden
Check out all my gardening tips for creating an English Rose Garden, to add visual interest to your yard.
Here are some of my best tips for Creating an English Rose Garden. Spring time is the most common time to plant and add beautiful color into your yard. Roses are one of my favorite flowers and prolific bloomers that I have in my yard that never disappoint year after year.
I do try to get unique bloomers to create an English style rose garden so I will always have a nice focal point throughout spring and summer months. While I do have a ton of the Knock Out rose variety in my yard, I also love to use and feature high end roses as well like the David Austin roses. 
Planting & Ordering David Austin Roses
You may remember a couple of years ago I ordered a complete starter kit of the David Austin Roses, which originated in England. They were a favorite of Queen Elizabeth II and can be seen on display in Kew Gardens. This is where I originally fell in love with a few of these varieties, while visiting Kew Gardens a few years back. I knew I wanted to ordered some of these varieties for my own garden, like the Darcey Bussell seen above, and the highly sought after Juliet which is a beautiful and rare peach color.
One of the main things I love about this variety is just how much they resemble a peony with the double ruffle petals and foliage. It is that reason they are highly sought after in a lot of wedding flowers and floral design work, along with the beautiful color variations as seen above in Desdemona and Heritage.
A few of my other favorites, which I have planted but are not blooming just yet in my garden:
- Roald Dahl a beautiful apricot yellow with double blossoms
- Munstead Wood velvet crimson with hints of blackberry
- Imogen cream to pale yellow with frilly petals
- Golden Celebration rich golden tea rose with strong fragrance
- Bathsheba subtle apricot-pink with soft yellow double blooms
Good Backdrops for a Rose Garden
A few things I have learned along the way are to add things with good background structure to make your roses pop. Evergreen trees and shrubs that can have the possibility of producing blossoms. This will create a nice framework or backdrop for you garden even when they may not be in bloom. Plus if you go with an evergreen foliage you will still have some green in the winter when the roses are dormant and not very pretty since they are just sticks and thorns. Here is a list of a few of my favorite background plantings:
- Magnolias- varieties like Little Gem, Bracken’s Brown, & Teddy Bears (large Summer blooms fragrant)
- Loropetalum or Weigela (spring blooms)
- Pieris Mountain Fire
- Gardenias (seen below) fragrant summertime blooms perfect to float in a dish or pin in your hair
- Camelias or Rose of Sharon (winter and early spring blooms)
- Hollies- Chestnut Leaf & Golden King are two of my favorites for leaf colors and shape with bright red berry clusters
Create Your Own Cutting Garden
One of my true passions for every yard is to create a cutting garden, so I can cut fresh blooms for every season directly from my yard. There is no greater joy than to go out and cut fresh flowers from your own yard and create a vase arrangement for yourself.
For this I have created specific gardens, like my David Austin Rose Garden, Peony garden, which you can see in the distance, and Hydrangea garden which is just starting to green up. While each garden has several specimens or varieties of flower in them, they will bloom throughout the seasons making a nice garden focal point. I also have a large variety of perennials scattered about the garden to intermix as well. Varieties of greenery and such to fill with is also available too. Here are just a few of my favorites:
- Pittosporum (I like the variegated variety)
- Karl Rosenfield Peony
- David Austin Celebration Roses
- Limelight Hydrangeas
You can see more about How To Grow Your Own Perfect Peonies and learn the differences between Limelight verse Autumn Hydrangeas at these great garden lovers posts! See more year round garden tips in my Four Season Garden post as well.
Love this post check out more great gardening post like:
Easy Perennial Division for Free Plants
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This is so beautiful- I wish you lived closer I’d have you redesign my entire house and backyard! The only flower I don’t love is a peony because they only last about a week and then make such a mess.
How beautiful! I so wish I had the patience to grow things. My mom does so I admire her garden!
This is so pretty!! I wish my garden looked this good! goals!!
Beautiful! Perfect for summer! I’d love to have them on my garden, lovin all the colors!
Your garden is inspiration!! Love these rose bushes.
I love growing roses! We finally got a couple bushes planted and they’re doing really well.
They are the most beautiful! I’d love to have my own garden with full of roses!
I definitely want to do something like this beside my walk way! I have a couple of rose bushes already just need more this is gorgeous!
So beautiful and elegant – I love what you’ve done here. I bought my mum a David Austin rose and it’s lasted so well.
I truly appreciate this post. I’ve been looking all over for something like this! Thank goodness I found it on Bing. You’ve made my day, Thx again!
I don’t think I could possibly do this in my yard, but wowza it is so beautiful. I wish I had better soil and more space to cultivate roses and have a cutting garden like yours. This is so inspiring.