Remember those magic crystal gardens that every kid had in the 1990s?
You’d set up this cardboard “garden”, pour over a special (magic!) liquid, and then watch as something incredible happened.
The cardboard trees and plants erupted into fluffy, bright, fairy-floss crystals. I usually credit my green-thumbed parents with fostering my love of gardening, but you know what, maybe it was just the entirely inorganic, $15.99 magic crystal gardens they bought me.
Did you love them, too? As a sensible grown-up, do you want to rekindle the specific sense of wonder they inspired? If so, you need to look no further than Seamus Johnston’s Mostly Roses garden, perched on a hill overlooking the South West Highway. It is a magic crystal garden on steroids, but better: it’s filled with roses. From the road in summer, it scarcely looks real — billowing clouds of blooming colour cascading down the hillside.
“I came here just over 20 years ago,” Seamus tells me as we meander past beds of rambling roses.
“When I got here the whole thing was planted on weed mat, which is a disaster long term, so I had to remove all of that. I pulled out a lot of trees that were in the wrong place. I removed 25 conifers. Then I started going crazy planting roses. I’ve now got about 1700.”
If you’re struggling to picture the scale of a garden filled with 1700 roses, I don’t blame you. Seamus grows Damask, Iranian, David Austen and Tea roses, and heritage roses from China that fade from butter yellow to dusky pink as they age.
Every rose I’ve ever seen seems to have found its way into Seamus’ patch. But his roses aren’t like the roses I’m familiar with. These are no shrinking violets, no wiry shrubs.
Seamus’ roses grow like trees. “A lot of people prune very heavy,” he explains. “But I don’t.”
If you (like me) have been following typical rose pruning advice, you probably prune heavily, too. I’ve always dutifully removed every inward-facing branch, cutting each bush back about a third to the nearest outward-facing bud. No more.
This advice, Seamus tells me, works for rose gardens in England, where fungus-breeding moisture is an issue. In hot, dry WA, there’s no need to be as heavy-handed.
Instead of hacking back his roses, Seamus focuses on his soil, cultivating a surprising cover crop for his summer mulch — weeds!
“When I arrived, the soil was rubbish. Now that I use the weeds every winter, I’m having to apply less fertiliser to achieve the same result,” he says.
Seamus’ garden, overflowing with blooms, mulched with weeds and spreading ever further down the hillside, is a true inspiration to any rose lover. If you lack rose-growing confidence, Seamus has one tip – plant roses that have “eyes” in the centre.
Iranian hybrids are hardy and are a great place to start. If what you lack is inspiration, just take a trip to the Southwest and visit Mostly Roses for yourself.