inTHE GARDEN- WITH HEVER CASTLE |
The roses have performed brilliantly this year at Hever Castle & Gardens- they’ ve flourished despite the heat and drought, producing an abundance of flowers in the Rose Garden and wider estate. I’ ve always been a fan of the rose, but 2026 has given me extra reasons to love this beautiful flower, from its resilience to its beauty and the timeless quality of its fragrance. November is the time to get your bare root plants in the ground. Planting roses this way is a great money-saver, as well as being really satisfying work as the days grow shorter and the nights colder.
If you buy your bare root roses from a specialist grower, consider purchasing them by mail order, so they’ ll arrive without a pot or soil and ready to plant.
How to plant bare root
• Your rose will arrive without a pot and minus soil.
• Give the rose a good drink- submerging the roots in water for at least 1-2 hours.
• Dig a hole in richly composted soil- if it needs enhancing, you can add compost or manure.
• Add bone meal to the bottom of the hole and mix in with the soil.
• Place the rose in the hole and infill with soil.
• Rose growers now suggest we cover the graft or‘ knobbly’ bit of the rose below
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the soil. Conventional gardening books used to have us leave them proud of the soil, but if we have windy, cold weather this can weaken the plant by allowing it to rock back and forth.
• Water the plant in well and if we have a dry winter, you can give the rose a drink every now and then to help it establish.
If you plant bare root in November, the roses will be established in June and reward you with fantastic blooms. It’ s not just roses that come‘ bare root’, either; you can plant bare root perennials like phlox, eryngium, echinacea and pennisetum grasses( fountain grasses), which all grow well and cost a fraction of a mature plant in spring / summer.
As with our rose instructions above, make sure to place them in water for 1-2 hours before you plant bare root. Find where the roots flare out from the stem and dig a hole twice as wide as the root system. Plant in the hole, ensuring the root flare is level with the soil, then backfill and water in.
Being thrifty is at the heart of gardening- we always like to look for ways of saving money( growing from seed or splitting perennials) and making your own mulch and compost is just an extension of this.
How to make your own mulch
Using what you have available and making do is something that our parents and grandparents were often really good at.
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It’ s something that many of us have grown unaccustomed to doing, but with many people tightening their belts this winter, I know plenty of gardeners who are forgoing buying ready-made mulch and making their own from leaf mould or using well-rotted compost.
If you need mulch now, pile your leaves on the lawn( making a bank of leaves), then use your lawn mower to mow across them, cutting the leaves into smaller pieces that can be collected and deposited around your plants.
Epimediums, ferns, grasses and hundreds of shade-loving species of plant have benefitted from mulching in our new‘ valley garden’- Church Gill- just beyond Sunday Walk at Hever Castle. We have used lots of mulch here to retain the moisture in dry shade areas and it’ s looking good as we head into winter.
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