Jay Robin’s Rose Garden

Dig a Little Deeper

With a lavish display of over 100 varieties of David Austin roses, the Rose Garden has been designed with formal beds set in a geometric framework of low box hedging, Euonymus ‘Jean Hugues’, Loddon Blue lavender, Teucrium chamaedrys and softly curving paths and walks.

The Garden is a riot of colour and scent during high summer and has been designed on a colour wheel of white, yellow, pink, orange and red roses, nestled between small trees and framed on two sides by topiary and 100-year-old yew hedges. As a nod to the original style of the 1902 plantings, we have used wooden trellis covered with rambling roses, delphinium, peonies and phlox.

Many of Borde Hill’s plants owe their introduction to Frank Kingdon-Ward. A beautiful pink rose, bred in India from Rosa gigantea and named after the plant hunter, was planted in 2016 against the brick wall beside the Yew topiary. Other rose species you will uncover here are the pale-pink ‘Brother Cadfael’ and ‘Fritz Nobis’, rich-pink ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ and dark-red ‘Chianti’ roses.

​​This is one of the most labour-intensive areas at Borde Hill because the beds are mulched annually and weeded by hoeing (fine in summer, but tricky when the clay soil becomes waterlogged in autumn), while the roses are given a granular feed twice a year and a foliar feed later in the season. A new approach to the pruning regime is being trialled to create a slightly different look with the aim to make the roses higher in the middle around the lollipop bays and lower at the edges. The process will take three or four years, with more mid-season pruning needed to achieve the desired shape.