Getting beautiful roses from the magazine page to the backyard

Winter is when you can finally enjoy the perfect rose garden. No black spot, aphid or faded blooms in the winter. Just imagine the perfect roses growing in your future summer garden.

Winter rose gardens bloom on the pages of magazines and glossy catalogs because winter is the season to order rose plants for early spring planting.

I promise you the perfect rose garden — on the pages of this free catalog ...

Glossy paper, gorgeous photos and roses blooming against the brick walls of a classic English garden, that’s what you will find as you leaf through the 100 page catalog of David Austin Roses.

You can go online and order this version of plant pornography (you will be lusting for these plants) by visiting www.davidaustinroses.com, or, if you don’t want to have a physical catalog delivered in your mailbox, you can still banish winter by enjoying the images of perfect rose gardens on the website.

Things to know about David Austin Roses:

The company is based in England but has American growers, so your order will not be shipped from overseas. Bare root roses can be delivered to your door for winter planting.

It also offers cut roses for weddings and events, rose-growing tips and landscaping ideas.

These English roses are known for their fragrance, repeat blooms and in our climate, enthusiastic growth. Even a severe pruning will not keep them small. Give them lots of room.

Local nurseries offer some of the same David Austin roses you see in the catalog. You can also request a specific rose variety from your local nursery and it might be able to order one for you.

A new variety for 2018 is called Ronald Dahl to honor the author of “James and the Giant Peach” and, of course, this rose blooms a soft orange red with the blush of a ripe peach. The fragrance is fruity as well.

I promise you “no spray” roses if you grow Flower Carpet roses:

Flower Carpet roses or “carpet roses” are the world’s most popular ground-cover rose, and here in Western Washington the brand is consistently free of black spot even, if you never spray for any disease.

This is also the most drought-resistant rose, due to the breeding of a two-layer root system. The surface roots absorb water the first year when they need extra moisture to become established and then sink tap roots down deep to make carpet roses camel-like in their ability to survive droughts.

Things to know about carpet roses:

These shrubby roses have a multitude of blooms to add summer-long color but they do not hold up long as cut flowers and they do not have much fragrance.

Flower Carpet roses come in a rainbow of colors, including white, yellow, orange and red, but the deep pink seems to be the color you’ll find most often at local nurseries.

All do best in full sun, but can adapt to part shade.

Pruning these fast-growing roses is simple. Just hack them back every spring by one third to one half. Use hedge trimmers, a chain saw or loppers. You can’t make a mistake no matter how you prune the carpet roses.

Don’t let the term “ground-cover roses” fool you. They are not low growers. You can expect these landscape roses to grow at least 4 feet tall in our mild climate. They make a colorful hedge or blooming ground cover on a hillside and can also be grown in large pots.

This story was originally published January 27, 2018 at 7:00 PM with the headline "Getting beautiful roses from the magazine page to the backyard."