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CHAPTER XI Roses as Fountains and Growing Free
Among the many ways of worthily using the free Ayrshire Roses, one of the best is to leave them to their own way of growth, without any staking or guiding whatever. Due space must be allowed for their full size, which will be a diameter of some ten feet. Of these useful garden Roses none is more beautiful than the Garland, with its masses of pretty blush-white bloom. It is well worth getting up at 4 A.M. on a mid-June morning to see the tender loveliness of the newly opening buds; for, beautiful though they are at noon, they are better still when just awaking after the refreshing influence of the short summer night.
Several others among the old Ayrshires are excellent in this way of growth, though perhaps there are none to beat the Garland and Dundee Rambler. A grassy space where they may be seen all round, or a place where the great bush may be free at least on two sides, are the most suitable, or they may be used as central or symmetrically recurring points in a Rose garden of some size. The young growths that show above the mass when the bloom is waning are the flowering branches of next year; they will arch over and bear the clusters of flowers on short stems thrown out at each joint. The way these young main branches spring up and bend over when mature is exactly the way that best displays the bloom. Each little flower of the cluster is shown in just the most beautiful way; and it is charming to see, when light winds are about, how the ends of the sprays, slightly stirred by the active air, make pretty curtseying movements arising from the weight of the crowded bloom and the elasticity of the supporting stem.
There is a whole range of use of these beautiful Roses, from this free fountain shape without any artificial support, to association with trees and bushes in shrub clumps and wood edges, and from that to clambering into the trees themselves.
The illustration shows this pretty Cluster Rose growing over and among some Pernettyas, beside a broad grassy way that passes from garden into copse. The young growths may be seen rising above it, as yet quite soft and tender, and only half grown. As the year goes on they will harden and mature and arch over, and next year bloom in their turn.
When these free Roses rush up into trees, instead of throwing out their new growths from close to the earth, they are formed upon the older wood higher up, and the stem or stems that supports them go on growing till sometimes they attain a considerable thickness.
Everything that has been said of the Garland Rose, as to its use as a fountain Rose or free climber, may also be said of Dundee Rambler, Bennett's Seedling, Félicité-Perpetue, and others of the cluster Roses classed as Ayrshires. They are all worthy of use in these ways, and of being encouraged to clamber into trees and hedges. One cannot help observing how the support of a tree encourages almost abnormal growth. The wild Dog-rose will go up twenty feet, and Sweet-brier nearly as high; while almost any Rose that has at all a climbing habit will exert itself to the utmost to get high up into the tree.
Climbing Almée Vibert is generally used as a pillar Rose, but the picture shows how it will rush up into a tree and increase, not only in height but in freedom of flowering.
The free-growing R. multiflora of the Himalayas also forms immense fountains, spreading in diameter by naturally rooted layers, from which new plants take root at the outer circumference of the great bush, throwing up strong growths, and so continually increasing its area. The large flowered one (R. multiflora grandiflora), as well as the double kind, are valuable varieties, with all the freedom of the type, while each has its own distinct development of somewhat the same class of beauty.
For spaces between garden and wild, for sloping banks, for broken ground, as of an old gravel pit or other excavation, for all sorts of odds and ends of unclassified places about the home grounds, the rambling and free-growing Roses seem to be offered us by a specially benevolent horticultural providence. A well-prepared hole is all they need at first. About four years after planting, if the best they can do for us is desired, they should be looked to in the way of removing old wood. This should be done every two years, but beyond this they need no pruning and no staking whatever. When they begin to grow freely among bushes or trees, if it is desired to lead the far-reaching growths one way rather than another, it is easily done with a long forked stick, and a very pleasant and interesting job it is. It is like painting a picture with an immensely long-handled brush, for with a fourteen-foot pole with a forked end one can guide the branches into Yew or Holly or tall Thorn very nearly into such forms of upright spring or downward swag as one pleases.
It is pleasant, too, in such rough places, to see the behaviour of one of these Roses on the ground without support, and to watch the different way of its own brother plant climbing into a neighbouring tree.
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