Building a Rose Garden

There is just something so beautiful about roses, isn’t there? The colors, the fragrance, the way they look in an arrangement on your dinner table… wow. I have bought roses all my life, but when I started seriously gardening several years ago, I knew I wanted to raise my own. I’ve planted multiple rose bushes in whatever space I could find in my front flower beds at my home, but I have known I wanted to create a designated space in my backyard for roses alone. So I went for it 2 months ago! Let me take you through the process and show you how put everything together.

Be sure to check out my YouTube video for a more detailed look.

The Site

When evaluating your area to create a rose garden, you need to keep several things in mind. First thing is that MOST roses need a decent amount of sun, at least 5-7 hours, with early morning sun being the best for roses. The next thing is that depending on your area and weather, roses tend to need a good amount of water. It can range anywhere from 2 inches once a week to almost daily when it is extremely hot outside. The last, and probably most important, factor in choosing your site is the soil. Roses prefer an average acidity soil but they need it be loose and fluffy and full of organic matter. Where I live in the greater Houston area, our soil is full of heavy clay (ugh!). So gardeners here may need to heavily amend their soil or build raised beds.

I chose the spot in the back corner of my backyard surrounding the magnolia tree. This spot is large and faces my bedroom windows, so I felt this would be a great space to build a beautiful rose garden. I knew this would be a major physical task, so I decided to use my money instead of my time to hire out the labor. Here are the steps we took to build the area:

Moved the lawn sprinklers out of the way and installed an extra zone for the bed.
Removed the sod using a sod cutter.
Installed edging along the fence and edges of the bed.
Added 1 foot of high quality soil.
Laid down weed fabric on top of the soil.
Added mulch on top of the weed fabric.

Acquiring Roses and Planting

When deciding on which roses I wanted to plant, I opted to go with varieties that would stay bushy and within 4 feet and would do well in our hot climate. And then of course I went with ones that were pretty, fragrant and disease resistant. I slowly bought all of my roses from Heirloom Roses over the summer when they became available. Since our summers are so hot here, I decided to plant them in grow bags until the weather cooled off a tad this month in October. When the time came for planting, I did the following:

Move aside mulch for the planting spot.
Cut open weed fabric (I use an X) and pull aside.
Remove any good topsoil and set aside.
Dig a hole twice as wide and deep as your plant’s root ball. For me this ended up being about 2 feet.
Fill in the hole with the topsoil and compost in a 1:2 ratio. This will help feed the rose as well as aid in water drainage.
Gently place rose into spot and backfill with soil/compost.
Replace weed fabric around rose and move mulch back.
Make sure to label your rose with variety!

Depending on you time of year, you may decide to add fertilizer on planting or wait. You can just add phosphorus if you are trying to encourage strong root growth, or if it is close to the growing season you can go with a full rose fertilizer. I prefer a liquid fertilizer such as Microlife’s Maximum Blooms. You want to fertilizer once new leaves are emerging anywhere from right after your last frost all the way through to 6-8 weeks before your last frost. You can fertilize after each bloom cycle or even up to once a month or once a week.

Here are the roses I have acquired that are planted in my garden:

Once I had all my roses planted, I set up a drip irrigation system. You want to water roses deeply at the roots and not overhead to prevent fungal disease, and I felt like this was best done with a drip irrigation. Here is the system I bought and installed.

Well there you have it! Be sure to stay tuned for upcoming posts and follow my Instagram for tips on growing roses throughout the year. And don’t forget to check out the accompanying video here!

Are you growing any right now? I would love to hear!

Happy Gardening,

Dani