Roses Floribundas Designed for the Landscape

What my busy family likes most about floribundas is that they are practically as easy to grow and to maintain, in our southern Michigan landscape as common hardy shrubs. (Actually, floribundas are hardy shrubs in every sense of the word.) And who could ask more of a plant that blooms all season, beginning the first spring and continuing year after year.

Their hardiness and ease of planting and culture make floribundas a good bet for any gardener who has been discouraged from rose growing because of the laborious planting and growing techniques they thought necessary. Roses do deserve good care to assure vigorous, well-balanced growth, but undue pampering with excessive feeding and watering is quite often the unsuspected cause of disappointment.

As a matter of fact, floribundas will do very well, indeed, in any sunny spot having well-drained soil that is good enough to grow good crop of vegetables. You may be reassured to know that I plant floribundas in a hole dug only a shovel deep and a little more than a shovel wide. My “rose garden” has moderately well-drained, medium-heavy, clay soil, so I mix some compost or some granulated peat with the topsoil before replacing it in the hole. Only rarely have I lost any of my roses, their only protection being a mound of earth drawn up around the canes in late autumn.

Floribundas were developed by breeders to provide an easier to grow, hardier, longer and more free-blooming rose than available in the hybrid teas. Their ancestry consists mainly of the hybrid tea with its large, finely turned blooms, and the polyantha, with its free blooming habit and high degree of hardiness. Occasionally a wild rose has been introduced in the parentage of a floribunda to increase hardiness.

In addition to being more hardy, the floribunda tends to make somewhat bushier and more compact growth than its hybrid tea parent. Its blossoms tend to be a little smaller than those of the hybrid tea and a little larger than those of the polyantha. They combine the exquisite form, brilliant color and much of the size and aroma of hybrid teas with the free flowering clustered habit of bloom of the old polyantha class.

Not only are floribundas suitable to the formal garden but they have an even wider use as color accents in the landscape, in small random groupings or large, massed plantings.

Floribundas are available in a wide range of colors. Award-winning newcomers and many others equally outstanding swell the variety lists each year.

by G Morrison

Over 22,000 subscribers
GET our free email newsletter...
Sign Up Today: