Selecting new roses

Linda Hellyer is curator of the rose garden at Dunedin Botanic Garden

Bare rooted roses will begin to arrive in the garden centres and nurseries from June onwards. This is the best time of year to purchase new roses and plant in your home garden. They come with a good colour descriptive label to you help with choosing.

You can also select roses by browsing through books and catalogues, as well as strolling around Dunedin Botanic Garden rose garden and looking at any of the roses still flowering.

We are coming to the end of the flowering season for the roses - many of the old varieties have finished flowering and the modern roses are showing signs of slowing as well. However, after the dry summer we have recently had, it’s surprising that some roses are healthy and still flowering well and even have lots of new buds still to open. That to me, makes a good rose, worth considering for planting in the home garden.

By visiting the Rose Garden now, you can look at a rose bush and judge all of the above. If many of the features are present then that is a sign of a good reliable rose bush worthy of a spot in your rose garden.


My 10 best roses for this time of year are:

'Matawhero Magic'
'My Girl'
'Tintinara'
'Iceberg'
'Burgundy Iceberg'
'It’s Magic'
'Glorious'
'Beach Baby'
'Ingrid Bergman'
'Lasting Love'