Posted on Tuesday, February 23, 2010 by admin in Garden Design |

BY INGER LUND

Admit it. Like most Americans, you’re just a little bit intimidated by things English. The accent, the pageantry, even the warm beer — they all make us feel just a tiny bit cruder than our English cousins. Lately even their gardens have seemed out of our league, as the buzz spread about glorious, superior “English roses.”

Never fear. Clair Martin, the curator of rose collections at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, has taken some of the mystique out of the British blooms. His new book, 100 English Roses for the American Garden (from Smith & Hawken and Workman Publishing; $16.95), describes plants that will get on famously in American soil.

Just what makes a rose “English,” anyway? As it turns out, the term refers to a group developed by British hybridizer David Austin in the 1950′s. They were bred to combine the best traits of old roses — beauty, charm, and fragrance — with the continuous blooming quality and color range of modern hybrids.

Clair Martin takes some of the mystery out of English roses.

Clair Martin first discovered the David Austin hybrids on a trip to Australia and New Zealand ten years ago and knew he had to have some in his collection. “I had no information on how these particular roses did in my climate specifically, so I just took the catalog information I had from Austin and planted them accordingly,” he says. “Working in a public garden, I had to figure out which are the big ones and plant them to the back of the border and the smaller ones in the front.” Martin’s trial-and-error method yielded imperfect results at first, but his experience has taken a lot of guesswork out of growing these roses in America.