Alex Henderson from RBG talks about creating a rose garden with ecological balance.

A Rose Garden Re-Imagined

In this episode we speak with Alex Henderson about the rejuvenated rose garden at Royal Botanical Gardens.

Henderson, Curator of Living Collections, explains that the original rose garden, planted in 1967, was suffering from the combined effects of poor soil health, rose varieties susceptible to disease, and a ban on cosmetic pesticides.

We chat about:

Creating more ecological balance by having mixed plantings of roses and flowering perennials
Changing from overhead irrigation to drip irrigation
Selecting rose varieties with improved genetics