I'm at Fenton House in north London which has a gem of a garden designed by
the National Trust to surround this magnificent historic house. The gardener in charge here
Andy Darragh is a big fan of roses and today he's going to show us how he prunes them.
Hi Andy, it's lovely to be here. I've seen this rose garden in full flower before
and it's absolutely amazing. You're you're a big fan of roses aren't you?
I absolutely love roses yeah, they're one of my favourites in the garden but one of the reasons I absolutely love them is
you can prune them at the time of year when the garden is all cut down and so you can access them really easily.
When you prune them they can look really beautiful as well
but also when they're in flower, the sun and the colours and they're just really great.
I do think it's not an English-style garden without a lovely rose in it.
The choice of roses can be quite overwhelming can't it? There are so many, how did you come to choose the ones here?
Absolutely, it can be quite overwhelming. I mean there's massive books on them, there's an encyclopaedia on them,
but it is really quite kind of amazing that there are so many different varieties that you can use for all different situations
so some for poor soils, some for even shade that you can grow on a north wall and flower quite happily.
Here at Fenton the soil is quite poor I think because it's at the top of a hill
and it will dry out quite readily so I just choose roses that I know really well are good doers,
that'll give you a great display and so there's kind of no risk factor.
You choose healthy, disease resistant, vigorous plants but presumably also how well they do
is a lot to do with how you look after them through the year. What's your maintenance regime? How do you feed them?
The feeding is kept really minimal. We try and always put a mulch on the soil
but we're kind of conscious of the beds are getting higher and higher and higher.
I do feed the entire garden with an organic chicken pellet just as they are coming into active growth
and that seems to be doing really really well. One thing I would do
if a rose is looking sick and it's had all the nourishment and it's had all of the health care that we could possibly give it.
and it's still covered in black spot it's still covered in aphids and it just looks tatty and horrible,
because we're not wedded to history or any particular cultivar or variety,
and as long as we've got it somewhere else, we will remove it and plant it with something more adequate.
So that's one way of making your garden look like it's always healthy.
OK so rather than sort of spraying with fungicides and pesticides you would just say
if it's not suited, get it out and find something else.
Yeah, there's masses of books out there to help you choose the right plant - and then obviously dead-heading which makes it look tidier
and that helps with the maintenance but then the biggest part is the pruning.
So some people do a light prune in autumn and then a proper prune in winter don't they? But I know you just do the winter prune.
Yeah here at Fenton we choose not to do that autumn prune purely because
we don't have a lot of wind which is what you're doing it for,
and also we get a kind of mad regrowth because it's still quite warm then, so we just choose to do the main winter prune.
OK, and pruning in winter is great isn't it? If you're right in the depths of winter when you prune you don't get any regrowth.
Absolutely yeah, and you can really be looking
at the form and the shape of the plant, to take out all the dead, dying and diseased and to get the right height
so they'll flower back up to the height you want them.
OK, well show me what you do on these shrub roses.
These are shrub roses aren't they? And I know you prune them a bit more lightly than you might prune other roses.
Yes this is Rosa Chianti and it's got a beautiful aubergine red colour flower.
It's a beautiful David Austin rose I absolutely love.
Can you just show me an outward-facing bud?
Sure, sure so it's looking for a nice healthy bud - there's a really good one there
and that affects where I want the shoot to go to, so if I prune for one that's inward facing it would come through the shrub,
whereas we want one to go outward from the shrub.
So this one I am going to go here like that - an outward-facing bud.
I'm going to take this one off here and it looks a bit radical but what it will do is put all the energy into this one - it'll help renewal-prune it
and it also will give space to the rose to the right of it.
With this one, I don't really want it to go much over the path if i'm pruning it say here,
it's going to come out to about here then I've got the bench which is coming back here,
So this one, I think I might prune a little bit harder than what I've been doing on the other ones.
There's a lovely new an outward-facing bud just there so I'm going to take that one off a little bit further down,
clearing out all the all the other debris.
Oh yeah, so it's really important to collect the fallen leaves at this stage isn't it, because they harbour black spot.
If you had more stems in the right places you could maybe take this one off, but they're two really good healthy ones.
National Trust gardens can be a great source of inspiration
and our gardeners and volunteers are looking forward to welcoming you when you next visit.
Until then why not get The National Trust School of Gardening from our shop.