There are several types of rose plants that English Gardens carries, including varieties perfect as cut flowers, to the types that are great as hedges or borders.

Roses can be categorized in several ways, such as use, petal count, color, fragrance, size, disease resistance and hardiness. In Michigan, we have to be concerned with winter hardiness, so let’s group roses into two: garden roses and shrub roses.

Garden roses are less winter-hardy for our zone than shrub roses. Garden roses include the types called Floribunda, Grandiflora, Hybrid Tea and Climbing roses.

Shrub roses include types such as Rugosa, groundcover, Polyantha and shrub rose.

Tree roses can be either a garden rose or a shrub rose, depending on the variety that has been grafted, however due to the graft, they are not winter hardy and therefore require extra winter protection.

Garden Roses
This is a diverse group of rose plants, but all have at least one thing in common: they are ‘budded’ (or grafted to a hardier root stock). This is the cluster where the canes come from. Any growth coming from below the graft will be a wild rose and needs to be removed by pruning. Many garden roses are fragrant, but not all of them. Breeding of garden roses has produced showier blooms and better disease resistance, but the fragrance has been lost. Recent efforts have refocused on bringing the fragrance back to roses. Here’s a hint: lavender and purple roses are among the most fragrant.

Floribunda Roses
A result of crossing Hybrid tea roses with the hardier Polyantha rose, floribunda roses are a bit more winter hardy than other garden roses and are often used as a hedge rose. Floribunda roses form upright bushy plants that take well to liberal pruning. The floral display is beautiful since they bloom in clusters, but due to lower petal counts they are not widely used for cut roses.

Some of the varieties of Floribunda roses English Gardens carries include:

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Grandiflora Roses
Large beautiful flowers blend the best from Floribundas and Hybrid tea roses. Grandiflora roses have sturdy stems and high petal counts that make them a favorite for cut floral displays, like hybrid tea roses and bloom in clusters like Floribunda roses

Some of the varieties of Grandiflora roses English Gardens carries include:

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Hybrid Tea Roses
Hybrid tea roses are the quintessential rose flower, with long sturdy stems and high petal counts. Hybrid tea roses are the oldest group classified as a modern garden rose and are the result of crossing Tea roses with Perpetual roses to yield a rose that is hardier than Tea roses and more inclined to repeat bloom than the somewhat misleading named Perpetual roses.

Some of the varieties of Hybrid Tea roses English Gardens carries include:

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Climbing Roses
A climbing rose is simply a rose that grows long and flexible canes. Unlike true vines or climbing plants, climbing roses do not actually climb, rather they grow long and require training to grow up a support. Climbing roses work well against walls and on trellises, over arbors and arches and grown on garden obelisks.

Some of the varieties of climbing roses English Gardens carries include:

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Shrub Roses
Shrub roses are generally much more winter hardy than garden roses. Like all roses though, they thrive in full sun and a rich organic soil that is moist and well drained. Shrub roses are prolific bloomers, producing flowers on and off or near continuous throughout the spring and summer seasons. While shrub roses will benefit from some winter protection, it is not absolutely required in order to make it through winter. All roses should be pruned back in the fall to keep its even size.

Rugosa Rose
This is a shrub rose that is native to Eastern Asia, China, Japan, Korea and southeastern Siberia. Rugosa roses are quite hardy, with textured leaves and an abundance of fine, needle-like thorns all along the stems. This shrub rose is notably fragrant too. In the fall, flowers give way to bright orange-red colored seed pods called ‘hips’. Rose hips are edible to humans and animals, offering a good source of vitamin C.

The varieties of Rugosa roses English Gardens carries are:

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Groundcover Roses
This is a group of shrub rose that grow wide rather than tall. While Flower Carpet roses have long been thought of as a groundcover, they actually can reach three feet tall. Drift is a relatively new series of true groundcover roses that usually only reach 18 inches in height and spread to about three feet wide.

Some of the varieties of groundcover roses English Gardens carries include:

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Knockout Family
A revolution began in the rose world with the introduction of Knockout roses. In 2000, Knockout quickly became the best-selling landscape plant in the country. Knockouts boast superior blooming and excellent disease resistance. There are seven varieties in the Knockout family and two almost knockouts. Knockout rose’s bloom from spring until the snow starts to fall.

Here are the varieties of Knockout rose that English Gardens offers:

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Rose Care Requirements
– Roses need as much sun as possible to bloom their full potential. A full day of sun is best, but a minimum of six hours of intense mid-day sun is required.
– Roses need a very rich soil, with lots of peat and organic matter. Be sure to plant your roses with peat moss, pine bark soil conditioner and rich black top soil.
– Roses like to be fed regularly. Use Espoma Bio-tone Starter Plus Fertilizer when planting and Espoma Rose-tone Plant Food throughout the spring and summer.
– Water your roses in the morning and avoid getting the foliage wet. Leaf diseases set in if water sits on the leaves too long or overnight. Consider drip irrigation at the base of the roses.
– Prune roses to allow for adequate air flow. Remove excessive canes to let air flow through the plant freely.
 A healthy rose bush can withstand minor insect invasions, but sometimes it can be too much and will need your help. Inspect your roses for signs of insects and take action if needed. Bring a sample of the infected plant into one of our locations for expert diagnosis.

Winter Care for Roses
Garden roses need to be protected through the winter months with a rose cone, which is an insulated top hat that covers the rose canes and keeps winters worst from getting to the plant. Roses need to be cut back to fit within the cone.

For climbing roses, remove all but the strongest 3-4 canes, then use a rose collar around the graft or crown. This gets filled with mulch to insulate the graft until it is removed in the spring. Another method is ‘heal in’, which is when you remove the rose from its structure, dig a trench and bury the whole plant through the winter. Use stakes to keep the canes held down so they don’t work their way out of the ground.

Heal in is also the way Tree roses are prepared to make it through the winter months.

The head is cut back to about 10” from the graft, and half of the roots are dug up. This allows the tree rose to be laid on the ground and secured with stakes. Cover the entire plant with soil then mulch. Uncover and replant in the early spring, after freezes have past. The tree will have to be staked straight until the roots grab ahold again, use Espoma Bio-tone Starter Plus.