Choosing the Best Roses for Your Garden
By Richard "Woodie" Buller, GGD co-founder with 35+ years in horticulture
Published On: Jul 9, 2020
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Roses are proven to be a perfect match for any garden! Not only are they beautiful, but also low-maintenance and consistent bloomers. If you’re new to gardening, it can be intimidating when reviewing all the options. No need to worry - Garden Goods Direct has plenty of resources to give you a green peace of mind.
Rose Bushes come in many varieties and each group has distinct characteristics that will give you the proper insight to help them thrive. Depending on the space in your garden, you can choose from shrub and climbing options. Whether it's a Knockout, Drift, or Oso Easy rose - we guarantee you’ll be confident in your selection with the proper knowledge. So... let’s get to it!
Knockout Roses
Knockout roses are wildly popular and have been for a while. Known to be a low maintenance prolific bloomer, you’ll find these beauties in most landscapes. While they are easy-to-grow and maintain, they do grow bigger each year and can get up to 6 feet tall and wide and are better suited to larger garden beds. They also have pronounced thorns which can make pruning painful.
Coral Knock Out Rose Bushes
Coral Knock-Out Rose Bushes bloom from spring through fall with masses of attractive coral colored flowers. The color only gets more intense when the temperatures cool off in the fall.
Pink Knock Out Rose Bushes
Pink Knockout Rose is a compact mounding shrub rose that is best noted for its ability to bloom in as little as 3 hours per day of direct sun with excellent disease resistance. Mildly fragrant, single pink roses bloom in clusters from May to frost. Its striking pink flowers are followed by orange-red tips during the summer months.
Peachy Knock Out Rose Bushes
This class rose-shaped shrub features pretty peach blooms from early spring to the first frost. Peachy Knock Out Rose has superior drought tolerance once established, and the toughness and disease resistance for which the family is known. This shrub’s vibrant color will perk up any landscape!
Sunny Knock Out Rose Bushes
Sunny Knockout Rose feature single, fragrant, creamy yellow roses that bloom in clusters from May to frost. It is best noted for its ability to bloom in as little as 3 hours per day of direct sun with excellent disease resistance.
Drift Roses
Although newer than Knockout roses, Drift roses are quickly becoming a gardener's favorite. Drift roses also bloom nonstop and don’t need to be sprayed for diseases. But, they are much smaller, growing only 18” tall and about 3 feet wide. Drift roses are often referred to as ground cover roses, making them great for landscape beds and containers, or as a cascade over a wall or bank. Drift roses have a more traditional ‘rose’ shape and some of them are even fragrant, such as Coral Drift and Sweet Drift.
Peach Drift Rose Bushes
Peach Drift Rose is one of the most floriferous dwarf shrubs available. Soft peach blooms cover the plant from mid-spring to the first hard freeze of late fall. Peach Drift Rose pairs well with perennials in any landscape!
Lemon Drift Rose Bushes
Lemon Drift Rose Bushes continuously flower from late spring through early fall and have a very busy and round habit. Its color starts out yellow and fades to cream white. The overall impression is yellow and creamy; reminiscent of the morning sun!
Sweet Drift Rose Bushes
This shrub features clusters of clear pink double flowers sitting atop dark green glossy foliage. Abundant, continuous flowering and exceptional disease resistance makes this a perfect choice for use along pathways, hillsides or at the front of a border!
Apricot Drift Rose Bushes
Apricot Drift Rose Bushes produce double apricot-colored flowers that begin blooming in spring and display a season-long show of color. It is just as tough and disease resistant as others in the series. Best suited for small gardens or along paths and walkways.
Oso Easy Roses
This low maintenance rose blooms prolifically from early summer to frost with some varieties having a single flower and others a semi-double flower. Color variations range from pink, red, yellow and orange. Touted as being “so easy” to grow, the roses in the Oso Easy series are becoming known for being disease resistant and not susceptible to black spot or powdery mildew. In the past few years growing Oso Easy’s in our nursery we have had no issues with disease. These roses are self-cleaning and require little to no pruning. As with any other rose the Oso’s are best grown in full sun and benefit from good air circulation. They prefer well drained and slightly acidic soil with medium moisture.
Oso Easy Italian Ice Rose Bushes
Similar to the world-renowned 'Peace' rose in its coloration, Oso easy Italian Ice Rose has orange buds open to soft yellow flowers melting into pink blushed margins. The beautiful flowers are semi-double, with 24-30 petals per bloom. This self-cleaning rose (no deadheading) has excellent disease-resistance.
Oso Easy Mango Salsa Rose Bushes
Mango Salsa Rose Bushes produces an unbelievable amount of continuous blooms that appear in shades of ruby-red grapefruit, summer sunsets, and those fancy tropical drinks with umbrellas in them. These compact plants are small enough to plant near walkways and other tight spots.
Oso Easy Paprika Rose Bushes
Paprika Roses start out as a beautiful orange and fade to coral with a golden center. Oso Easy Paprika Roses bloom from Summer to frost. They are very cold, hardy, carefree and disease resistant. Its low, mounded shape makes it an ideal selection for any size landscape!
Oso Easy Double Red Rose Bushes
If you want a true red, Oso Easy Double Red is hard to beat. It covers itself in fully double, cherry-red blooms from late spring right up to frost, stays compact and mounded, and rarely needs pruning. The glossy leaves shrug off black spot without spraying, so it looks great massed along a walkway or tucked into the front of a mixed border.
Why Today's Roses Are So Much Easier
If you gave up on roses years ago because of black spot and spray schedules, give them another look. Modern shrub roses like Knock Out, Drift and Oso Easy were bred outdoors without chemical help, so only the cleanest plants made the cut. Most rebloom every five to seven weeks from late spring to frost, and many are self-cleaning, so there's no deadheading. A lot of them are grown on their own roots, too, which means if a hard winter nips the top, what comes back is the same rose you planted.
Classic Roses Are Back, Too
If you want the old-fashioned look and fragrance, hybrid teas and floribundas have come a long way. Breeders have folded better disease resistance into those big, high-centered blooms, and they're still the best cut flowers in the garden. We cover our favorites in why hybrid tea and grandiflora roses still rule the garden and the vase. For an arch or fence, browse our climbing roses.
How to Use Roses in Your Landscape
- Borders and walkways: A row of compact shrub roses along the front walk turns it into a red carpet all summer.
- Climbing: Train a climber up a fence, trellis or arbor. Give it a few seasons and it becomes the focal point of the yard.
- Mixed beds: Roses look right at home with catmint, salvia, coneflower and ornamental grasses. The perennials keep the bed buzzing while the roses rest between flushes.
- Containers: Compact roses like Drift do well in a large pot. Pick a deep container with good drainage holes, use a quality potting mix and give it at least 6 hours of direct sun.
How to Plant and Care for Roses
- Sun: At least 6 hours. Morning sun is best because it dries the leaves early and keeps disease down.
- Planting: Dig a hole twice as wide as the pot and no deeper. Set the crown level with the soil, backfill with your native soil and water in slowly.
- Mulch: 2 to 3 inches, pulled back from the canes.
- Water: Deep and infrequent. Water at the base, not over the leaves, especially in the evening.
- Feeding: Work in compost and a balanced slow-release fertilizer in spring. Stop feeding 6 to 8 weeks before your first frost.
- Pruning: In late winter or early spring, take out dead or crossing canes and cut shrub roses back by about a third.
There are so many more options so shop America’s best online selection of roses for your home and garden now!