Rose month at Hidcote

What’s on this Rose Month?

While we're working hard to reopen many of our places where it is safe to do so, Hidcote won't be open this June, so we're doing all we can to bring Rose Month to you virtually.

Over on Facebook every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we'll be featuring a selection of the roses grown here at Hidcote. 

Throughout June 2020, Senior Gardener, Vicky will be filming a series of videos in between her essential tasks, with snippets about the history and care of roses and companion planting, allowing you to find out a little bit more of Hidcote’s roses from the comfort of your sofa or perhaps a garden lounger. 

Join us on Monday 1 June for a Facebook Live talk with Vicky as she shows you around the roses at Hidcote. 

Follow us on social media to keep up to date with the Rose Month features, and read on for a virtual rose hunt around Hidcote's garden and see some of the highlights.

                                                                                                                                                                        
Going on a virtual rose hunt at Hidcote

The Fuchsia Garden

When it was first designed, the area now known as the Fuchsia Garden was planted with annuals, however by 1915 Johnston had planted a permanent display of roses, recorded on one of Avary Tipping’s visits, when he described it as a rose garden, presenting “a show of exquisite roses in exquisite condition” including the pink Rosa ‘Gruss an Aachen’. Close by, Johnston also planted roses around the Green Room, now enclosed by hedges, training roses across ropes and trellising.  

The Pillars

The Pillar Garden was created in the third phase of the garden's development in 1923 with the help of Lawrence Johnston’s newly appointed and only professional gardener, Frank Adams.

Roses were used extensively throughout the Pillar Garden, combined with plantings of peonies, salvias, penstemons and philadelphus.

Long Borders

Spotlight on roses - a quick summary of our favourites at Hidcote

Rosa ‘Versicolor’ in The Long Borders

Gallicas are the oldest of garden roses and their influence is present, at least in some small degree, in nearly all our garden roses of today.

A Shrub rose, with an intense scent packed with 200 colourful petals. Rosa ‘Versicolor’ is apparently also the rose depicted in the painting 'The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child' by Sandro Botticelli in 1485.

Rosa ‘Buff Beauty’ in The Old Garden

'Buff Beauty' is a well-balanced, arching shrub rose with a rounded habit. The rose blooms repeatedly throughout the summer and into autumn producing large clusters of double, cupped flowers of buff yellow to apricot which pale to primrose.

This rose is a vigorous grower which will thrive on most well drained soils. It has good disease resistance and is very versatile, it can be grown in beds and borders, as a hedge, up a pergola or against a wall or trellis.

Rosa 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' in the Maple Garden

This rambling rose is sweetly scented, best to grow through a tree and extremely rampant. Imagine looking up in the Maple Garden to see the rose growing through the trees. It's good in both sun and shade, flowers in June/July and is not repeat flowering. Its wild origins are uncertain but are suspected to lie in the Western Himalayas.