(Clockwise from top left) At the end of the third month of spring, peach pink yarrow blooms with roses: small single ‘Ballerina’; large double ‘Evelyn’; semi-double ‘Mortimer Slacker’.

The first rose blossoms herald the last days of spring and hint of summer ahead. One of my dreams has always been to grow roses as if they were regular garden shrubs among other plants instead of the “isolation wards” you often find them in. That idea came about first so that people visiting a place with old roses (for example, Empress Josephine’s Malmaison), could delight in the magnificent blossoms during the four- to six-week annual bloom and compare their fragrance, shapes, and colors.

The introduction of the “blood” from Chinese roses for breeding brought about varieties that bloom more than once. The longest-blooming, repeat-flowering bushes are the hybrid teas. But those plants are notoriously disease-prone. That’s the other reason for rose ICUs. By the 1950s, when “better gardening through chemistry” was the mantra of the home gardener, it was normal for devotees (or their husbands) to don HAZMAT suits (or not) for the weekly spraying of the roses with fungicides and insecticides. Putting all the plants together made that task easier. You can visit rose gardens and see plants in naked beds with mulch to keep water from splashing on the leaves. Today, roses are being bred to be disease resistant, ever-blooming, and easy. There have been successes, but these roses are not fragrant. If there is a solution, the discovery of the perfect rose, it lies in the future.

I grow some English shrub roses bred by David Austin. They are fragrant and some of them are fairly disease resistant. But I try to grow all of the roses in my garden with other plants with varying success. If there is any one tip to overcoming diseases without chemicals, it is to provide excellent air circulation if you can. Healthy roses resist disease. Place three new plants of each variety in a large hole in soil enriched with both drainage material and nutritious compost. Water the rose soil (not the leaves) weekly in summer with the equivalent of two inches of rainwater and feed them regularly. If the spot you hope to grow roses receives less than eight hours of direct sunlight in summer, move them.

My favorite companions for roses include catmint, colorful-leaved plants like the chartreuse shrub bluebeard (Caryopteris ‘Worcester Gold’), purple smoke bush, and small trees planted to the north, like the red-leaved peach (Prunus persica varieties) and Chinese dogwood (Cornus kousa). Ground covers may be planted in front of, but not touching, the roses’ woody stems.

(Clockwise from top left) Red-leafed peach tree; royal fern (Osmunda regalis); a young leaf of Ligularia ‘Britt Marie Crawford’; red Rosa ‘Dr. Huey’ (in various stages); Rosa ‘Abraham Darby’.