Skiekitty mentioned buying multiples of Sterling Silver, and I started thinking about how multiples of one plant could be used in a garden. I have a hedge of sorts of Carefree Wonder, and a red bed of 3-4th of July with 4-Valentines Day and 2- Topsy Turvy and 2 Scentimentals repeating through it.
I can see using neutral colors such as silvers and white to separate bolder colors. In another bed, I have multiples of Carefree Sunshine, Sunny knockout, and a yellow carpet rose. Tall ornamental grasses and yellow echinacea fill the space between the roses.
How do you use multiples of the same rose? Do you spread them throughout, or group them together, or make a hedgerow or draw a line of sorts?
Inquiring minds want to know.

Sometimes.

When I plant minis I alway buy three at a time just so they have some impact in the garden. There are other cases, too. There's a place in my garden where two paths cross. I intend one day to put a tall arbor there. I've planted the corners with four Mme Alfred Carriere which I hope will grow vigorously and evenly into something well suited to growing on an arbor. There's another spot where a small path breaks from the main one which I have framed with two Blush Noisette roses. There are multiple copies of Don Juan in the garden simply because I like the idea of a fragrant red climbing rose. In a spot at the back of a deep bed by a fence I recently planted three Graham Thomas, my first execution of David Austin's idea of planting his roses in threes. Twelve feet away is Le Reve which I have seen growing to 35 ft at Roseraie de l'Hay. I thought GT needed some mass to stay in scale.

There's a spot in the garden where I have planted cerastium tomentosum, a silvery groundcover that grows wonderfully in our dry climate, making tiny white flowers in the summer. One Lili Marlene has been growing among these plants and just yesterday I added another. There's a spot at the other end of the garden where six Europeana grow among artemesia. This combination is more successful because the Europeana makes dark purple foliage that works well with the silver foliage of the artemesia. A triad of Claire Austin is in the same area.

I purchased five Day Breaker with the idea that I'd plant them in a certain bed. But by the time they arrived, I decided to use the bed in a different way, so now they are scattered in twos and threes about the garden. I increased my count of Rainbow Sorbet and Coral Crown to three this year. And I planted Double Delight in a triad. I only planted two Barbara Streisand because I wanted Paradise to complete the triad.

I find striking a balance between making a scenic garden that would make sense to, say, a landscape architect, and collecting good roses in their many varying styles and colors is not trivially easy. But when things work it can be quite rewarding.

Cindi - What I'm going to do with some of the Sterling Silvers is I have a small section that is filled with Bluebeards (Caryopteris x clandonensis). I'm going to plant 1 Sterling Silver between each of the bluebeards so that I have a nice row of blue going on. The other 4 (or more if I have to get them) will be ringing around a small Hot Wings Maple (http://www.gardensofthewildwil...). I traditionally try NOT to get multiples of the same rose because I don't have a gazillion tons of space (I have a back pie-wedge lot of a cul-de-sac... yes, it's big for this area but still, not enough to house a million roses & shrubs & trees & all the other nonsense I want ), but sometimes I make exceptions for my fav's. I have multiples of Blue Girl, Sterling Silver, Charisma, & Golden Masterpiece. Everyone else I have just one of.

I have 2 places where I did multiples. We installed a small length of fence just for rose display reasons, they do not fence anything in, but they help support the roses. On one I have 10 Quadra,





and on the other I have Happy Cl.

Oh such wonderful ideas! Steve, I am saving your post in my great ideas folder.
I saw a Paradise rose today and it matches a mystery rose I have, so I think I'll go back for it and do just what you said- but with just 1 of the Barbra roses. Which kind of artemesia are you using? Tall, like Silver King, or shorter, like Silver Mound or Sea Foam?
I saw Claire Austin cl. at a nursery and didn't bring it home and I've been kicking myself ever since. I may have to take a day trip and go back for it, and this time I will buy 2. It will go on an arch that has Snow Goose on one side and James Galway cl on the other.
I love love love a good plant combination. It's the feeling I get listening to a symphony or the harmonies of Boyz II Men, a marching band or dance troupe. All give me a calm, happy feeling.

Thanks Cindi. I agree. There are so many wonderful roses and so many plants that complement them. I love Toni's idea of using caryopteris. My inclination is to plant it with yellow-flowered roses such as Sunsprite or Berolina, then to add a dash of red or orange. Maybe six Sunsprite, three caryopteris, and two Kardinal? What would go with that? Maybe some california poppies?

Too often, though, my cunning plans get interrupted by the need to find a spot for a recent acquisition. Another problem is that a really strong design depends completely on the well-being of every single plant. One plant out of place or in the wrong color or one year too young, even, can ruin the effect. So it's just hard to pull off. It's hard to imagine doing even a plan of moderate scale until one has complete confidence in one's ability to keep every plant in the design alive.

Mary, the rail fence is a great prop for the garden. Quadra and Happy look really good on it. BTW is that Happy or the climbing version? I only ask because I just planted a climbing Happy to replace a Chevy Chase and I wanted to know how big it gets. And whether I could expect that many flowers from it .

In the front yard I have a row of RedGold & Sterling Silvers: RedGold / Sterling Silver / Sheila's Perfume / Sterling Silver / RedGold. If I were to redo it, I'd take out the RedGolds & replace them with Charisma's instead. I want to order more Blue Bayou's next year. I'm in mourning, though.. my poor little itty bitty pathetically tiny Blueberry Hill didn't make the winter. And that's a hard one to find. I've only seen it locally once, and that's when I bought it. Tried to get it from GVR, but they didn't have it available when I wanted to order. So now I'm on the Hunt for that one.

That is climbing Happy, and that pic is from last year, it is bigger now, but I haven't taken pics yet this year because it hasn't reached full bloom yet. It looks like it is going to be pretty large, but I am disappointed with the rebloom, which is sparse. Not what I expected from a polyantha.

Steve, when I lose a crucial piece of a design, I place a piece of pottery, or a chair or birdbath, or tower, or gazing ball or something else in there until a new plant can be added. Sometimes I end up leaving the item. Your touch of color doesn't have to be a plant, but if you want red, daylilies come to mind. Many of the red ones bloom for 8 weeks or so. Well here they do, not sure about AZ.
I have some blue glazed pots that really come in handy in the flower beds. Seems like that color goes about anywhere. Long ago, my kids pulled an old wooden lawn chair out of the trash and painted it green. (and purple, and pink, but it's green now). it looks pretty good in the garden, and I find myself sitting there, taking breaks, more and more. One of my little dumpster divers will be coming home in a few weeks after she graduates, (while she searches for a job) and I might put her to work painting chairs. Doesn't DD stand for Dumpster Diving Daughter?
One of the rose beds has yellow roses, tall grasses, yellow and purple baptisia, caryopteris, russian sage, salvia, amsonia, iris, and a backbone of tall shrubs and arborvitae. I tried adding a touch of orange and then red, and didn't like either one. There is a dark red smoke tree in the back, so maybe that's all the contrast it needs. Yellow and purple, IMHO, are the perfect combination.
Having said that, I do have a bed with red roses that have dark purple clematis runnning through them and Homestead purple verbena and red petunias as groundcover. I like that combo too, but it's kind of hot. The yellow- purple is calming and feels more natural, so I have it near where i sit in the evening. The yellow and purple plants I have are also very xeric. If I don't water the red roses enough, their color doesnt' hold up well.

Try adding some Intrigue roses... the color will compliment the purple smoke trees admirably. I would mix those with Queen Elizabeth, Moonstone, Golden Masterpiece, Golden Spirit Smoke Bush, Sunshine Bluebeards, Basket of Gold, Julia Child... that sort of color scheme. I'd stay away from the "hotter" colors, such as Strike it Rich, Charisma, Gingersnap, Mr.L, etc. Also, you don't want to mix it in with the more softer mauve roses like Blue Girl / Sterling Silver. You could use Stainless Steel if you can find one.

I'm also very fond of the purple smoke tree. I had one in NJ and it stopped traffic, once. It is simply stunning among silver-leafed plants. I think Intrigue might look good with a purple smoke tree. I confess that I would prefer a smoldering orange there, though. The first purple smoke tree I planted here died. Very convincingly, too. It played half dead its first year and never came back its second.

I love the idea of using pots and painted chairs as place-holders. I find that almost nothing makes a garden say "linger" quite so convincingly as an ample supply of great places to sit that are well integrated into the design.

I also like your use of plants with fine textured foliage: grasses, amsonia, and russian sage. Plants with small flowers and fine foliage tend to soften edges in a way that really draws attention to roses. The voles ate all but one of my decorative blue (helicotrichon) grass in the first year. My russian sage never grew at all. I have yet to plant amsonia here. So I depend on artemesia, cerastium, silver leafed salvia (salvia argentea), silver dianthus and a marguerite daisy from Annie's whose name I cannot recall. I am learning to use iris to give texture to a bed. Christopher Lloyd hated iris because it was impossible to keep weeds out of their beds, but I am learning that they can add sculptural interest to rose beds. (He also hated roses.) And when iris are not all bunched together they are not hard to weed.

I'm afraid that I am a little cautious with yellow in the garden. I absolutely love it with dark green foliage. And I love it with true blue flowers. One will find it with certain shades of maroon in nature and I'm happy with that, though I've not learned to use it well. When it comes to mixing yellow with mauve-like colors, though, I tend to run away screaming. I do love mauve mixed with cool reds and pinks, though.

Yellow and pink can be very good together or very bad. I think they look best if their saturation and brightness are comparable: i.e. strong yellows look best with strong pinks. But, of course, every one has their own tastes in colors and there is no right or wrong here. I agree that orange doesn't work with silvers very well with gray foliage. It might explain why I don't have many orange Iris.

I do think that I need a place to plant a bed of six or so Julia Child next year. I wonder if she would consort well with Lady Emma Hamilton? Three, maybe? Then I need a rose with some weight: dark red but not too purple. Perhaps L.D. Braithwaite, quantity two. This might look good anchored with a purple smoke tree. Now to find the right spot in the garden...

Here's my Julia Child with iris...my own silly joke--the iris have names like "Butter Cream", names that seemed to belong next to Julia. Not sure of exact names, that bed's so overgrown I can't find tags anymore.



Here's my out of control artemesia with Memorial Day in the foreground and Burgundy Iceberg in the back. On the other side of the trellis, I have Red Eden. The purple allium were sure nice while they lasted! Not showing in this jumbled shot are the clematis on the trellis. I have deep purple, white, and a Florida Seiboldii which was declared dead 3 years ago. Guess it was just slow to wake up...later on in the season, purple echinacea fill in where I yank artemesia out. They are already in bud stage, so early!


I really need to get outside earlier in the day to take better pics. The wind is already strong so it's hard to get a stationary shot of anything.

A few feet away from Julia Child, I have Golden Celebration and Graham Thomas. Farther down in the same bed is Ketchup and Mustard and Sunshine Daydream. The K & M is out of place but I'm not moving it. There are daylilies in between those roses, so the color clash may not be as obvious later in the season.

*swoon* so pretty... I have 1 (yes, count 'em, ONE!!) rose in bloom right now. Rise n Shine has given me two little blooms.


However, my neighbor 2 houses down has her corner in full bloom. Irises & clematis.. so pretty!!

Cindi, I got a chuckle from your planting joke. The other day I planted rose Kimono next to Geisha. Seemed like they might just belong together, even though I doubt that anyone will ever look at them and get the joke.

I do think Burgundy Iceberg looks great with artemesia.

And what's a garden without lamb's ears? It's serving as an edging plant for one of my beds. It's essentially evergreen here and it's pretty tolerant of drought. I love the texture and color it brings to the garden. So far I've been happy that it doubles in size every year. I keep dividing it; but it keeps multiplying! In ten more years I won't even need to have any other plants in the garden. I'll be up to my ears...

It's funny how sometimes a strong yellow color will just clash with a softer tone. I once planted rudbeckia Goldsturm near an apricot hollyhock. I was delighted with the way each looked individually in bloom, but the two together almost made me run screaming from the garden.

Toni, that's a nice shot of Rise 'n' Shine. Mine have not yet started thinking about making buds.

What I did with some of my BlueGirls I just picked up was this: I had a 6' section that had a tree that croaked. If I try the same area for more than 3 times and the tree I plant there dies each time, I make it a "no-tree zone" and plant roses in that area. Well, this was now declared a no-tree zone and planted a total of 5 roses there: 4 BlueGirls in a square and Marilyn Monroe in the center. I keep wanting to call that rose Marilyn Manson.. dunno why. I guess I don't correlate a vibrantly sexualized girl like Monroe with a beige rose. Some of the Sterling Silvers I picked up I put in my "Red/White/Blue" bed. That bed has BlueGirls, Mr. Lincoln, and a mystery White HT (it was labelled Red Masterpiece, but blooms these gorgeous white smelly roses). There's also red columbines in there, too, and the backdrop is my Mount Baker lilac.

The white one is JFK. So you've got two presidents and two Blue Girls in a bed. There has to be a punchline.

hahahaha... OK, I never even thought about the girls & the Prez... But my original JFK doesn't have a scent & is more yellowish than this one. It's pure pure pure white. Plus it doesn't haven't the pointed buds like my JFK does, more of the fat roundy ones. But that's still funny.. JKF w/Marilyn Monroe...

Or any Manson with a Blue Girl....

Oh, BAD!