Trend Alert: Rosa Glauca for a Wilder Garden
Leaves and stems that can be described as “glaucous” have been big this year—not least at the Chelsea Flower Show—with dramatically flowered opium poppy and Sicilian garlic reveling in the waxy textures of late spring.
They are a crispy memory now, but the red-leaved rose, Rosa glauca, another show leitmotif, is still going strong and about to enter its next phase as a producer of luscious, rounded red hips.
Photography by Jim Powell for Gardenista.
At Andy Sturgeon’s “Mind” garden at Chelsea this year, Rosa glauca featured in the meadow.
R. glauca‘s rose family is listed as “wild” by David Austin, a rose that is native to Central and Southern Europe. The glaucous rose looks at home in a garden in a way that a wild dog of a rose, such as Rosa canina, might not.
Mixing with common ox-eye daisy under a weeping birch, Rosa glauca does well with plants in the red color spectrum too. byzantinus and a more refined cultivar of red valerian, Centranthus ruber var.
Rosa glauca is a holder of the RHS Award of Garden Merit, and it is almost unbelievably easy-going for a rose.
It takes any soil and any aspect whether sheltered or exposed; it does need full sun but is clearly all right with humidity, the downfall of many old-fashioned roses grown in the United States.
Ranging around an informal display with Stipa gigantea grass.
Also called the red-leafed rose, or ‘Rubrifolia’, has a valuable hue and texture in its leaves, which are variously described as grayish-purple, purple-green and mauve-copper.
In gardens that are more about texture than corsetry, this silvery tone mixes brilliantly with every kind of contrasting shape and color (including gold), enhanced by R. glauca‘s dark red stems.
Rambling and scrambling with other self-sufficient plants.