I would love to read design advice and/or see pictures of groundcover roses used successfully in a garden.
I put groundcover roses in front of my rose bed. I have Fire Meidiland in a different bed with some strawberry plants. That one is doing well. Even though that bed gets all natural care, that rose has the least blackspot of any in my garden.
My current challenge is the groundcover rose "Baby Blanket" in my main rose bed. Although this is its first full year in the garden, it has sent out thin canes up to 12' long with branching canes up to 6' long. It has reached the sidewalk and is covering some taller roses that are slower to establish. I donned a leather jacket, jeans and gloves and started wrestling with the "Baby Blanket". I have trimmed the canes back to 3-4' and begun to rescue a couple of slower to establish roses at risk of suffocation.
Nearby is Vineyard Song (I think that is its name, a Moore rose) which has grown bigger and wilder than expected. I cut it back a bit as well. Both were tangled together. Yikes. I felt like I was wrestling a prickly octopus. At one point, I got my hair and my jeans caught. While I was already miserable, I got the weeds pulled out from around these roses. Of course, a stray morning glory was complicating matters.
I have already been moving the mini roses to the front of the flower bed - I had extended the bed to the sidewalk earlier this summer. The major problem is too many plants in too small a space, but ...well....they all have names. I want to make my growing plant collection look as beautiful as possible. I want a cottage garden with mostly roses, but today I felt like Brier Rabbit in the brier patch.
I still have to get to the Austin roses growing on a trellis. Actually, they are overgrowing the trellis and waving at passersby (or giving me an obscene rose gesture, I'm not sure which).
I would love to have the front of my rose garden look like NewYorkRita's "floribundaville". At the moment, I have a couple of monsters and some tiny plants establishing themselves. This is my first garden, it is a work in progress.
