Growing Roses

If you are into organic gardening growing roses is an absolute nightmare.  What do you do if they get blackspot?  You can't use chemicals - and eventually you just give up and consign the roses to the compost heap.  When growing roses organically, the secret is to grow the roses that are resistant to disease.  These include the rugosas, gallicas and many of the small-flowered ramblers, rather than the modern, repeat flowering varieties.

The German nursery Kordes stopped spraying their own rose beds in 1976 because they had virtually written off the rose as ungrowable.  Initally, whole fields of roses died, but Kordes selected the few specimen that had remained healthy and used those as the base of their breeding programme and within ten years they had bred a range of healthy, modern roses, which were sold in Britain by Mattocks Roses.