Smitten by roses (From Worcester News)

Smitten by roses

10:55am Wednesday 12th October 2011 in Gardening

WRITER and broadcaster Edward Enfield may be best known for his entertaining observations on old age and travel and for being the father of comedian Harry Enfield, but he’s also an expert in the garden, particularly when it comes to roses.

With 50 years of gardening experience under his belt in the garden of the house he has lived in throughout that time, set in threequarters of an acre in West Sussex, he now shares some of his horticultural experiences in his latest book, Growing To A Ripe Old Age (Summersdale, price £9.99).

For a while, he became obsessed with roses, joining the Royal National Rose Society (RNRS) and entering his roses in the Billingshurst Show.

He said: “Roses can become an obsession, a mania, a disease, and I caught it. Some of the madder members of the RNRS refer to themselves by the fairly frightful sobriquet of ‘rosarians’ and while I never went as far as that, I went pretty far.

“I got all the society’s books and used to sit up late into the night with catalogues of roses, planning and re-planning beds of different shapes with roses of different combinations to go in different parts of the garden.”

He’s grown all manner of roses, from hybrid teas and floribundas, to China roses, David Austin roses, shrub roses, ramblers and more, and has even tried growing roses from seed.

He said: “I am pleased to say that sanity has returned and we are now down to one excellent rose bed with a few other roses here and there.”

During his rose show days, he used to spray his prize specimens to stop black spot and mildew, took action against greenfly and other aphids and would strip all but one bud from the leading shoots in the hope of obtaining one perfect bloom on each. These days, the former columnist for The Oldie is more relaxed about his roses.

He said: “My bed isn’t colour coordinated.

They’re just jumbled up. I’m very bad on colours. I tend to wear the wrong coloured pullover with the wrong trousers.

“Anyway, I don’t believe that roses ever clash. So any mixed bed will look okay as long as you have the heights right, so obviously don’t put the short-growing ones in the middle, or they’ll disappear.”

Today, he has one main rose bed comprising mainly hybrid teas, with the occasional David Austin thrown in, and another smaller one in the vegetable patch which he uses for cutting. He grows about a dozen varieties but among his favourites is Sutter’s Gold, a hybrid tea rose with deep yellow blooms with a pink flush.

Enfield said: “It’s quite an old rose but for all its failings, in that it doesn’t last very long in water, it has a wonderful scent, grows on lovely long stems and produces blooms of a perfect shape.”

He thinks it’s best to grow roses in one bed and to feed them three times – once in spring, another in summer and the third in autumn – and spray them against fungi and mildew once a fortnight throughout summer.

He said: “There are those who have a childlike faith in spraying greenfly with soap and water in the belief that this will drown them, which in my experience it doesn’t.

You can choose a proprietary insecticide which boasts of its green, organic and generally harmless properties, but I find these also to be harmless to the creatures they are meant to kill.

“So I can only suggest that you look along the shelf in the garden centre and choose some poison which somehow persuades you that it might do the job.”

He also takes care over pruning, although he recalls an experiment by one of the horticultural societies in which one lot of rose bushes were pruned lightly, another lot heavily and a third were hacked with a hedge cutter.

Enfield said: “To the great surprise of one and all, those hacked off with the hedge cutter did the best.”

He’s never been brave enough to do that to his own roses. He said: “I go and do it all properly, pruning them twice, cutting out the dead wood and spindly little growths in autumn, then shortening the main stems so they don’t rock about in the wind.

“Then in March, when growth is about to start, I prune them some more, where possible cutting to an outward eye, where a group of leaves join the stem.”

His final tip: “Roses rather like Epsom salts, which is magnesium sulphate, and probably will do extra well if you put a teaspoon of them into the spray when you are spraying the leaves.