With their great beauty, tremendous variety, and luscious scent, it's easy to become passionate about those all-time favorites, roses. For many, roses are the symbol of a well-cared-for home, evoking images of that picket-fenced cottage awash with rambling roses. Like Oscar Wilde, who could "resist anything except temptation," those who give in to the temptation of roses are richly rewarded. In addition to being beautiful flowers for arrangements, roses lend themselves to a wide variety of crafts, providing everything from petals for creating potpourri, to the vitamin C-rich seed pods (called rose hips) for rose hip tea.
If you decide to plant a rose garden, do it with the understanding that, as with all temptations, there will be a price to pay. To do what they do so well--namely, produce quantities of beautiful, fragrant flowers--roses need special attention. Although it's possible to mix any number of roses in with a shrub border, it's far easier to be lavish with that attention if they are segregated in a small bed. Ten to 12 rose bushes will make a magnificent display, provide plenty of flowers for cutting, and require a bed only 8 feet by 12 feet or so. Any shape of bed will do, but generations of gardeners have favored the formal look of square, rectangular, or round beds, edged with stone or brick, often with a birdbath or sundial placed in the center for a little added interest.