How to plant and care for roses

Discover with our practical guides how to plant and care for roses and to take care of them:

How to plant roses

Yellow double flower of ROSA ‘Golden Celebration’
  1. Choose the right place. Roses need full sun, i.e., direct sunshine from the morning until the evening. Avoid wet places and spots where water can stagnate (in winter as well as in summer).
  2. Prepare the planting place. Dig a hole of 50 × 50 × 50 cm. Separate the first layer of good ground. Replace the lower (bad layers) by 50% of compost. Plants need nutrition just as you do!
  3. When you close the planting hole, put the first layer on top. Do NOT put any soil or compost on top of the root ball.
  4. Water (at least 12 l) near the stem.
  5. If possible, put some mulch on top of your planting (without touching the plant’s stem). This will reduce weed and keep the soil moist. Do NOT use cut lawn or compost containing cut lawn.
  6. Be careful with the urine of domestic animals like cats and dogs (but also foxes, badgers…). This can cause fatal damage to plants. Urine on evergreens, especially yew, conifers… can react like weedkiller.

How to care for roses

Red double flowers of ROSA ‘Falstaff’
  1. Always watch soil humidity, especially during the first year. NOTE!! It can be misleading to believe that rainfall brings enough water for your plants. The only real mean of control is a simple rain gauge. It is as important as a spade in your garden.
  2. Reflowering roses (you will get flowers continuously until winter) need finished flowers to be taken off systematically to motivate the plant to produce new flower buds. Otherwise, the rose plant will focus on producing useless fruits and seed.
  3. Roses easily get illnesses like MARSONINA rosae and DIPLOCARPON rosae. To prevent those, treat your roses on leaves, branches and stems with Bordeaux-mixture (used in organic agriculture). You can diminish its concentration if you increase the number of treatments. If your plant shows already black spots on its leaves, treat the whole shrub to get healthy new leaves and buds.
  4. If you have not covered the soil around your plant with mulch, break the crust on the ground regularly to help water reach the roots (rain as well as artificial watering).
  5. We do NOT recommend pruning before winter because this opens new wounds representing entries for illnesses. If you have to, prune as few as possible AND treat your shrub with Bordeaux-mixture immediately after.
  6. Roses don’t develop plenty of roots. Therefore, they need you to help with nutrition: put a 10 cm thick layer of manure around the plant at the beginning of winter. Avoid touching the stem.
  7. Any waste from roses (branches, buds, leaves…) should be burned or put in the waste bin because often, they enclose illnesses.