Stop, smell and order your roses

For the widest choice and cheaper plants get in now and order your roses. Popular and new varieties will sell out quickly.

Popular and new varieties of roses will sell out quickly, so do not delay.

Now’s the time to place orders for roses that will be delivered as bare-rooted plants in mid-winter. Popular and new varieties sell out quickly, so don’t delay. Buying roses this way offers the widest choice and plants are cheaper. They’re grown in the ground then lifted when dormant, cleaned of soil, trimmed and packaged for shipping. Despite arriving as bare sticks, they’ll establish quickly when planted and flower within months. Breeder Brindabella Roses focuses on resistance to black spot fungus. Its new Modern Classic roses (including ‘Rapture’) have classic hybrid tea style flowers with strong fragrance on a bushy, 1.2m-tall shrub. They repeat flower in flushes every six to eight weeks through the season. Among the new releases from Wagner’s Rose Nursery in South Australia is ‘Painted Princess’, a luscious, perfumed rose featuring ruffled pink petals splashed with fine white stripes. ‘Always an Angel’ is a Wagner’s charity rose, supporting the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation, bearing a constant succession of intense gold blooms on a hardy bush. ‘William and Catherine’ is a typical David Austin rose, producing clusters of cupped, full-petalled blooms with a pure myrrh fragrance.

New releases

New rose varieties offer temptation in the form of perfume, colour, petal formation, size and vigour.

‘Always an Angel’

‘Painted Princess’

Here are four of the hotly anticipated 2025 releases.

‘William and Catherine’

‘Rapture’

Q&A

When I planted three citrus in large pots nine months ago, I filled the potting mix to the top but it’s now 180mm below the top. Should I leave them, backfill in situ, or repot them?

Dave de Jonge, Sydney

This is a common problem in pots and planter boxes. Over time, the organic matter in potting mix gets used up so the levels slump. You can’t just add a thick new layer on top as this smothers the fine feeding roots and can rot stems. You can regularly add 1-2cm-thick layers from the outset to prevent the problem becoming severe. Otherwise you need to remove the plants, add new mix in the bottom of the pot and replant. Adding 40 per cent of perlite to your potting mix helps reduce slumping because perlite doesn’t degrade, yet has similar water-holding and nutrient-holding qualities to organic matter.

Does a newspaper layer covered with mulch help or hinder the soil when it’s is very wet? Does it make the soil funky or help protect it in heavy rain? And does it help with earthworms?

Anne Stuart, Mullumbimby, NSW

Mulches (including newspaper) help protect soil from the physical damage of heavy rainfall but if you want the soil to dry out faster, then raking it back will increase evaporation. Earthworms migrate away from waterlogged soil to survive, but mulch is beneficial for them otherwise. Heavy rain leaches nutrients from the soil, so you need to replace them, preferably with organic based fertilisers.

Can I strike cuttings I took of a Clerodendrum ugandense? They’re long, thin shoots that arose from the roots of a plant that’s struggling in shade.

Harry Browne, by email

Blue butterfly bush is usually propagated by stem cuttings, using pieces from near the ends with two nodes; lower stem cuttings tend to grow into thinner plants. Late summer and autumn is ideal. Dip ends in hormone rooting gel. Keep cuttings warm and humid. You can also lift and divide the rootball or dig down to sever some of those suckers with some roots attached.

Charlie Carp fertilisers. Picture: Supplied

Send your questions to [e-mail] The best question for May will win a pak of Australian made and owned Charlie Carp fertilisers, worth $112