David Austin Roses For Canadian Gardens

David Austin roses are some of the most renowned and beloved roses in the world. Since the 1950s David Austin has been working to combine the beauty and romance of old roses with the performance of modern roses. More specifically his goal has been to bring together the flower forms and fragrance of old roses with the wider colour range and repeat-flowering of modern roses.

You need only look at the beautiful photographs and to grow and smell your first David Austin rose to understand that these English style roses are something special in the rose world. They will quickly grow into magnificent shrubs and climbers that will transform your garden with their old world charm, fragrance, and performance.

Characteristics of David Austin Roses:

  • Form: David Austin roses tend to grow as shapely shrubs with a bushy mounding or arching growth habit. The climbers are strong and vigorous usually with flowering down to the base.
  • Flowers: A wide range of colours with unique, cupped, old fashioned, multi-petaled, and often quartered blooms that change in colour beautifully as they age.
  • Fragrance: Renowned for their strong and diverse fragrances including old rose, tea, myrrh, fruit, and musk.
  • Repeat-flowering: Cultivars will repeat flower providing a long season of interest.
  • Design Potential: Highly versatile for different garden styles and uses including mixed flower beds, traditional rose borders, fragrant hedges, large pots and containers, for the cutting garden, and for large landscape plantings.
  • Health: Bred for vigour and garden performance with great disease resistance. Every cultivar is trialled under rigorous conditions for eight years before being introduced to the gardening public.

As with all roses, these cultivars prefer full to part sun for best flowering and overall performance. Some are tolerant of and will bloom reasonably in part shade which could describe a location with 3-4 hours of sun per day, a spot with dappled light throughout the day, or a position against a north wall that is open above with bright reflected light. Tolerance of part shade is noted in each of their descriptions below. Roses also prefer rich soils with added compost and fertilizer and ample deep waterings, especially during summer dry spells.

David Austin roses are rated as hardy to zones 4 or 5, depending on the cultivar. For tricks on how to grow these roses in colder zones than their official rating, read our article on “How to Grow David Austin Roses in Zone 3”.

And if you love the form and fragrance of these roses, remember that David Austin is certainly the most famous breeder of English style roses, but he is not the only one. Other breeders such as Kordes, Meilland, and Weeks have bred amazing English style roses with incredible forms, colours, and fragrance that very much deserve to rub shoulders with David Austin roses in your garden!

At Phoenix Perennials we offer one of Canada’s largest selections of David Austin roses with 50 or more cultivars each year for Canadian gardeners. We launch online pre-ordering as part of our Great Rose Pre-Order every fall or winter for the following spring with options for gardeners in Richmond, Greater Vancouver and beyond in British Columbia to pick-up your roses as potted plants at our Richmond, BC nursery or for bare root mail order shipping across Canada from March to early April as weather warms up in your region. You can also shop for roses in person at Phoenix Perennials through the spring, summer and fall.

If the Great Rose Pre-Order is currently running, you’ll find it in our Pre-Order Area. To be the first to know about the launch of the Great Rose Pre-Order and to receive articles on roses, subscribe to our Rose Alert.

Have fun perusing the many cultivars of David Austin roses that we carry and selecting the perfect plants for your garden. Not all will be available each year but we’ll have most of them!