Discover the timeless beauty of historic white roses like *Rosa alba semi-plena*. Learn their fascinating history, symbolism, and how to grow these elegant, low-maintenance garden classics. Perfect for cold climate gardens!
Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm concludes his fascinating series on old garden roses with one of his personal favorites—the Portland roses. Often overshadowed by their more famous successors, these roses represent a critical turning point in rose history. Their story intertwines with the excitement of reblooming roses in Europe, a genetic puzzle, and a…
Deadheading is one of those gardening tasks that can feel tedious, especially if you have a lot of plants in bloom. But as Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm explains, it’s a simple yet impactful technique to tidy up your garden and encourage reblooming. Whether you’re learning how to deadhead roses, manage perennial blooms, or…
Roses are celebrated for their beauty and fragrance, and selecting varieties with the most alluring scents can take your garden to the next level. Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm shares his top picks for fragrant roses, highlighting their diverse colors, growth habits, and distinctive scents. While roses share an underlying “rose” fragrance, their scents…
Spring has arrived, and it’s time to dust off your pruners to prepare roses for their growing season. In his latest video, Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm delves into the classic “rules” of rose pruning, breaking them down to separate tradition from practicality. With seven key rules guiding the process, Jason helps gardeners prune…
Learn how to prune roses like a pro! Discover simple tips for timing, shaping, and maintaining healthy shrubs, plus debunk common pruning myths for beautiful blooms and a thriving rose garden.
(First published in the Roses-Canada Quarterly Journal) The farmers’ market might seem a slightly off-key place to sell roses. There among the hand-crafted soaps and blackberry honey, the beaded jewellery and ancient grains bread, I know I seemed a little out of place. Don’t get me wrong. You’d sometimes find a vendor who offered a…
For most gardeners, pruning roses can feel like a maze of decisions: Is it the right time? Does the rose need heavy pruning or just a light trim? To make this process easier, Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm created a detailed flowchart. This step-by-step guide helps gardeners navigate pruning decisions with simple yes-or-no questions….
Continuing my Youtube series on the old garden roses, this on covers the Gallicas. This class of roses was so dominant in Europe in the middle ages, there were literally hundreds of cultivars. Treasured for its close-to-red color, breeding focused on high petal counts, deep shades of pink and purple, and novelty traits like stripes…
Red is the new purple, purple the old red. At least as far as western rose breeding goes, this is the way it went. Maybe red was always a desirable color, but among the old garden roses of Europe, true red wasn’t one of the options. There was white, light pink, dark pink, and even…
This Gallica rose is old, but no one can say for certain how old it is. It has persisted in gardens since at least the 1800’s and is often listed as a favorite rose of people who love the form and scent of old garden roses. You really have to give it to the breeders…
Imagine I’m hosting a quiz show. I have a panel of noted rosarians ready to buzz in. I unveil cuttings from a rose variety for their inspection and challenge them to “Name that rose…” After clicking furiously at his buzzer, contestant #1 pulls at his facial hair, shifts his baseball cap, and answers with a…
Discover the timeless charm of old garden roses—fragrant, resilient, and steeped in history. Learn about their origins, unique traits, and how to grow these living connections to centuries of gardening tradition.
How do species roses compare to the ones hybridized for gardens and cutting? Very different, but beautiful in their own way, I’d answer. Have a look at one of our native roses, Rosa woodsii: It has <gasp> only five petals. Calm yourself. This isn’t a mistake. The garden has one set of rules, and nature…
