Ideal picnic spot: the rose garden in the Britzer Garten Photo: Konstantin Boerner
By Claudia von Duehren
She is simply too beautiful to devote just one column to her. That’s why I’m writing about the rose again today – with useful tips from a true connoisseur.
In my garden she is currently giving her all on the rose arch: a pink climbing rose climbs the arch from one side, while a white rambler rose winds its way up the iron grating from the other – simply magical. So that Sleeping Beauty gives me a second flower, she now gets fertilizer again.
Berlin’s most beautiful rose garden offers at least ten rose arches in a row. In the Britzer Garden, 5,000 roses in 200 varieties can be admired on 12,000 square meters.
The gardener Beate Räuber (60) has taken care of the queen of flowers for many years and gives the most important tips here:
1. Only multi-flowering roses now get a second dose of fertilizer after spring.
2. Spotted leaves have the fungal disease rose rust. Remove immediately and do not throw in the compost, but in the household waste. For roses in tubs, replace the soil next year, the rose rust is hardy and survives in the soil.
My red climbing rose blooms several times and is now being fertilized again Photo: Claudia von Dühren
3. To combat aphids, spray on a soapy solution made from soft or curd soap or spray and pour in a decoction made from field horsetail. New in trend is neem oil against the pests. Here, however, the expert lacks empirical values, as she herself emphasizes. She has always avoided using pesticides.
4. Faded flowers consume too many nutrients. Therefore, cut diagonally downwards and outwards above the first leaf with five leaves.
5. If you replace roses, the soil at this point must be exchanged for new rose soil.
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