David Austin: gardeners' favourite roses
Picking a rose for your garden can be a fiendishly difficult task. Many of us have to deal with a small garden and therefore have to be selective. To complicate matters, everyone's idea of a perfect rose differs - some like delicate pink blooms with a classic old rose fragrance, while others prefer a dusky Tudor-like flower with a heady myrrh scent. Should you choose a rambler or climbing rose to romp over a wall or fence? Or a classic rose bush to sit in your border? To help you choose we've asked the experts, gardeners and garden designers who have seen every variety of rose under the sun, to pick their absolute favourites.

- David Austin Roses1/19
Horticulturist Charlie Harpur's favourite rose is Rosa spinosissima, the Scotch or Burnet rose. "It's a really tough and reliable wild rose which is lightly fragrant with good hips. It's native to the British Isles and found growing in poor sandy, often coastal conditions. My favourite form in cultivation is R. spinosissima 'Dunwich Rose', a single white flowered rose with spreading habit that was found growing on the Suffolk coast in the 1950s. The lilac-pink semi-double R. spinosissima 'Falkland' is also fantastic, with the most notable specimen I know of being an integral part of Beth Chatto's dry gravel garden."
R. spinosissima 'Dunwich Rose', £19.50 for a bare root rose from David Austin Roses.
- David Austin Roses2/19
Garden designer Lottie Delamain has recently become enamoured of David Austin’s 'Albrighton Rambler'. "It ticks a lot of boxes - a climber, extremely pretty pale pink double flowers, repeat flowering, lovely musky scent and most importantly, doesn’t mind shade and will happily scrabble up an east-facing wall, even in a pot."
English rambling rose 'Albrighton Rambler', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 3/19
Garden designer Butter Wakefield's favourite rose is 'Gertrude Jekyll' - a repeat-flowering pink rose, with a deep old-fashioned scent.
Rosa 'Gertrude Jekyll', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 4/19
Garden designer Jo Thompson's favourite rose is 'Adélaïde d'Orléans', a rambler bred by Antoine Jacques, the head gardener to the Duc d'Orleans, in 1826. This rose is perfect for growing over pergolas and archways - pink buds open to frothy semi-double blooms.
Rosa 'Adélaïde d'Orléans', £27 for a potted rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 5/19
Garden designer Arne Maynard's favourite rose is 'Cardinal de Richelieu', an almost thornless rose bearing flowers of a dusky dark purple, with petals the texture of velvet.
Rosa Cardinal de Richelieu', £19.50 as a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 6/19
Sir Roy Strong's favourite rose is 'Canary Bird'. "It has wonderful delicate quite tall arching branches covered with tiny, single lemon blossoms - some friends who live in Italy introduced us to this rose when we were just starting out making The Laskett Gardens. It flowers very early."
Rosa 'Canary Bird', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 7/19
Garden designer Hugo Bugg's favourite rose is 'Queen of Sweden', a classic bred by David Austin. It has soft pink cup-shaped blooms and a myrrh fragrance.
Rosa 'Queen of Sweden', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 8/19
Christopher Woodward, Director of the Garden Museum and garden designer Luciano Giubbilei both chose Rosa canina, the wild dog rose, as their favourite rose.
Christopher is enamoured with the ones which grow wild on the shore below the Louisiana Museum, on the Baltic coast of Denmark. Luciano Giubbilei loves the way it "grows on the edges of the road and in the fields forming an accent in the landscape." Brief pink blooms give way to hips that turn scarlet in winter.
Rosa canina, £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 9/19
Garden photographer and gardener Sabina Rüber's favourite rose is 'Ispahan', a classic pink damask rose with a spectacular scent.
Rosa 'Ispahan' £27 for a container rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 10/19
If garden designers Isabel and Julian Bannerman could only have one rose in their garden it would be 'Rambling Rector'. At its peak it is covered in a mass of small semi-double white blooms with open petals revealing glorious golden stamens.
Rosa 'Rambling Rector', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 11/19
Garden designer Jinny Blom's favourite rose is 'Senateur Lafolette', a salmon-pink climber with large romantic blooms.
It's hard to find in the UK but you can sometimes purchase it online from French nursery, Florum.
- 12/19
Garden designer Graham Lloyd-Brunt's favourite rose is 'Lady Emma Hamilton', a highly-scented apricot beauty bred by David Austin and named for another English rose, the mistress of Lord Nelson.
Rosa 'Lady Emma Hamilton', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 13/19
Florist and plantsman James Horner's favourite rose is**'Madame Grégoire Staechelin'** - "her flowers are of the clearest pink and are loose and voluptuous." He recommends planting one under an apple tree as the early blooms coincide with the apple blossom. The long vigorous canes produced every year by the rose can be trained ino the crown of the tree.
Rosa 'Madame Grégoire Staechelin', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- Getty14/19
Garden designer Cleve West's favourite rose is Rosa woodsii, a wild rose native to North America - "A client gave me a cutting and I love it so much now that I try and include it wherever I can on new projects."
Rosa woodsii, £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 15/19
English cut flower growers, Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy of The Land Gardeners, chose 'Ferdinand Pichard' as their favourite rose. Its pink flowers are striped with splashes of deep crimson.
Rosa 'Ferdinand Pichard', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from Crocus.
- 16/19
Landscape and garden designer Thomas Hoblyn's favourite rose is Rosa moyesii 'Geranium' - "Its long arching stems create a fountain-like habit when allowed to grow naturally. It has beautifully simple red flowers and frilly foliage, but it is best know for its persistent amphora-esque hips. A large shrub best for the back of the border that will add good structure to any scheme."
Rosa moyesii 'Geranium', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 17/19
Our Garden Editor, Clare Foster's favourite rose is 'William Lobb', "it has wonderful mossy buds, and flowers of the most fantastic, dark crimson-purple, the colour of a regal gown."
Rosa 'William Lobb', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 18/19
Online features editor Bonnie Robinson's favourite rose is 'Albertine'. A rambler, bred in 1921, it has dark glossy leaves with dark pink buds which open with an elegant blowsiness. Old fashioned and divine.
Rosa 'Albertine', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.
- 19/19
Gardener, cook and writer Sarah Raven's favourite rose is 'Wild Edric'. She loves its healthy and vigorous growth, fragrance and the fact that it is rich in rose oil for cooking with.
Rosa'Wild Edric', £19.50 for a bare root rose, from David Austin Roses.