Hello, welcome to Mottisfont. This is our beautiful rose garden
and it's really special because we have the National Collection of pre-1900 shrub roses,
so the old-fashioned roses that just flower once but have amazing fragrance.
We wanted to make this film today so that we could share the rose garden with all of our members.
We know that we have to restrict numbers at the moment
to keep everything safe so we just wanted to share as many as possible with you,
so you have a sense, and then you can come back next year and enjoy it.
We have more than 450 different types of rose in this garden and more than 2,000 individual rose plants
but I'd like to focus on just a few today, I want to share with you some of my favourites.
We're by a really special rose now,
this is one of the oldest roses that we have here at Mottisfont.
This is Rosa Gallica Officinalis, this is the Apothecary's Rose
so it's one of the medieval roses, one of the roses that came back from the Crusades
and which was used by people for particularly its medicinal qualities.
The rose hips of course have all sorts of great vitamins and things that are good for us.
It's one of the roses that causes our our visitors to question
why we don't remove the spent blooms or deadhead.
Well this is one of the old roses so it won't reflower if you take the spent blooms away
and that'll stop the hips from forming
so we actually like the hips because they're very pretty in their own right
but also they're great for wildlife.
One of the really special things about our garden is that it is full of fragrance,
you walk in on a warm day and it just envelops you.
And we're standing next to one of the lovely scented roses
This is Comte de Chambord, it's a really great rose
because it's nice and compact so it works very well in small gardens
but it combines that fragrance with a repeat flowering habit.
This is because the rose growers in the 18th century
crossed the medieval roses that they'd always worked with, with China roses,
and these left to their own devices in their natural environment will flower all summer long.
And they created the repeat-flowerers - great for us in our gardens
but also this was the thing that meant that the old-fashioned roses fell out of favour
because who wanted one rose that would just flower once
when you can have one that would flower all summer long?
This is a rose that we always suggest to people who don't like prickles
or the thorns that you get on roses
because some gardeners really find that quite difficult to deal with.
This is Lykkefund - I'm not sure if I'm saying that right - it's a Danish name
but it means lucky find and the lucky find about this is
that it has no prickles so the stems are completely smooth
and you can garden away without ever once getting scratched.
It's also great for bees - the bees absolutely love this so it's a wonderful thing to put in your garden.
The garden here was the idea of Graham Stuart Thomas, the plantsman and collector
who was also a National Trust Gardens Adviser in the '60s and '70s
and he wanted to find a home for his personal collection of old-fashioned roses.
He had brought this collection together over many years of looking for them
in hidden corners of stately-home gardens and finding roses
and then comparing them with the old rose books and identifying them again.
He wanted somewhere where these collections could grow and thrive
and actually it was the gardeners here at Mottisfont who worked out how to look after them,
how to make it so that they would carry on growing
and we still propagate from those roses today.
I love this space - this is our potting shed and it's tiny but very well organised
and this is the nerve-centre for all of the care that goes on in the gardens.
This is where we do our propagating,
it's a hugely important part of looking after our National Collection
but also all of the planning for the pruning and the different activities that go on here.
Looking after our roses is a constant task and actually there are all sorts of little things
that people worry about, that we can share our tips on how we do it.
We don't actually use fungicides at all or insecticides
we use our own homemade compost to give the plants a really good mulch.
That will actually help you to fight off the pests because if you've got great mulch
you will get a fantastically healthy plant.
it'll be a lot stronger and where we see things like black spot or rust
we literally just pick off the leaves and then throw them away in your rubbish.
Don't put them in your compost, just take them off and throw them away
and if you get something like black spot and it carries on
it's OK, it will be fine the next year.
It's just a normal part of having certain types of rose.
I hope you've enjoyed that little glimpse into the rose garden here at Mottisfont.
Ongoing care of gardens like this all across the Trust
is of course only possible because of the fantastic help that you give us,
our members, supporters and visitors.
We need your help more than ever now thank you so so much