This is our favourite time of year for only one reason – the roses.

What would we do without them? What isn’t there to love about them? Their timeless beauty is proof of their popularity. They fill your garden with perfume and from bud to bloom they delight us whether clambering over trellis, an old brick wall, lighting up the flower bed or simply covering the ground.

If you are new to roses, you may think that they require chemicals to control the insects and diseases that bug them.

We are here to report that it is possible to grow beautiful roses chemical-free. Mark has been growing roses in his garden for 35 years without the use of pesticides. He has more than 25 roses in his collection and he does not spray any of them.

How to grow roses the natural way

1. Buy roses that are naturally “disease and insect resistant.” These words, when written on the tag of a Canadian-grown rose, are golden. A rose variety that carries on with its business of flowering and attracting butterflies and songbirds to your garden without surrendering to black spot, powdery mildew and aphids (to name a few of the potential enemies of the rose grower) is a winner in anyone’s books.
2. Change your habits. Sometimes the “problems” with roses are the result of things that we do to grow them. Black spot and powdery mildew? Water only at the bottom of the plant, avoid wetting the foliage, water in the morning so that the sun burns off surface moisture and by above all allow the soil to get dry between waterings about five cm down. This is most important of all. When you do water them, do so thoroughly
3. If you have a persistent problem with insects or disease on your roses, use an all-natural solution. Diseases? Use garden sulphur or Bordo mixture for control.

Insect problems? You will be surprised at how many of them can be dealt with nicely using insecticidal soap. Or, just ignore them and let the birds and carnivorous insects such as praying mantis devour them.

The ‘perfect’ rose

We have been hearing from the organic producers of apples, tomatoes, and all manner of edibles that we need to look at the fresh food that we consume a bit differently: To accept that not everything fit to eat looks like a perfect picture. We suggest that the same is true for flowering plants as well, including roses.

Changing our standards is one other solution to insect and disease damaged roses. The perfect, blemish-free rose may not be the only rose worthy of our attention. We have seen some fine flowers born on thorny stems with some black spot on the leaves.

Give aphids a stiff blast of water from the end of the hose to rid your garden of them.

Mulching

Remember to add at least two in. (five cm) of shredded bark mulch this time of year, which helps deter weeds and retain soil moisture.

As the season progresses, you will want to keep your roses blooming for as long as possible. When the flowers fade, the rose will set seed which slows the production of new flowering shoots. Remove these blooms to fool the plant into producing more flowers. This process is called deadheading. This form of summer pruning involves removing the finished bloom at the abscission layer, which is the slightly swollen section of the stem below the bloom. In the past, it was the practice to remove the bloom far lower down the stem, but it has now been proven that retaining maximum foliage on a rose promotes a better performance and appreciably more flowers.

If you think that the best show in the rose garden is long gone, you might be surprised. The June performance was spectacular, but the September show can be just as good. The shorter days and cooler temperatures of late summer and early fall suit roses well. Especially if you “deadheaded” yours last spring.