Could I have written a more clickbait title? This woman - she’s burning bridges at the rate of knots! Writing competitions, rogue states, champion rose growers… Is there no sacred cow she won’t go after?
Stay tuned. But for David Austin, let’s scroll back for context.
Last night, with the kitchen tidy, and the animals - human, canine, feline - fed, watered and walked, I found myself with nothing to do at 8.30pm. Miracolo! It was tempting to go berserk and buy the five bare-root roses in my online shopping basket (£11 each from Cottage Memories). But, one glass of wine down and with a post-dinner Magnum double chocolate cherry ice cream in hand, instead, I took my laptop to bed, and inventoried my roses in a colour-coded Excel spreadsheet. (I know! And I hate Excel!)
This is how things started out, before 2025. I do not expect you to read my frankly pedestrian notes, as they were just for me, but it gives you an idea. (In case you do zoom in, I have deleted the excessively repetitive ‘stunning’ ‘love love love’ ‘glorious’ etc. There are only so many words one can use - a rose is a rose is a rose, etc.)
This was pre-2025. And then, these are my acquisitions since:
TWENTY NINE. There are twenty-nine roses in my 16m x 8m garden (most of which is grass.)
This exponential increase (and the cause) can be demonstrated in graph form:
The cause: Lucy Maxwell of
, giver of Rosa Debutante, Lucy of a thousand tulips. This was also around the time that I started ’s Small Garden Design course, and decided that the eleven roses I already had weren’t quite enough.Which brings me to David Austin, and haemorrhaging cash on the garden. When Lucy and I met, I had a pretty serious cut flower habit. As in, I couldn’t pass a local flower stall without buying bunch of tulips or anemones or ranunculus - while wondering if the awareness of this Nancy Mitford anecdote (which popped up at the beginning of
’s Home!) made it any better:‘Muv once offered a prize of half a crown to the child who could produce the best budget for a young couple living on £500 a year, but Nancy ruined the contest by starting her list of expenditures with “Flowers - £490”’
Jessica Mitford, Hons & Rebels
‘Girl math’ is an appalling phrase. I will never repeat it in front of the children, however often I justify the purchase of paint, ribbons and bows as an ‘investment’. An investment in… something. But the sentiment applies to my flower purchases - spend £30 on cut flowers (lifetime: five minutes) or spend £30 on a David Austin rose (lifetime: infinite, subject to a hard prune, and tidying up dead leaves). With this in mind (she says, smugly) my cut flower habit has dropped over the past year to the point of non-existence. (You might look at the list above, and think wtf, did she actually buy a shrub rose every time she wanted a bunch of dahlias? I couldn’t possibly comment.)
Before you decide the garden has bankrupted me (it’s cheating if you ask my husband) Lucy pointed out that if you buy your roses for £10-£12 from a niche rose buyer like Cottage Memories, your £ goes even further. They haven’t spent anything on marketing, a fancy website, or a gorgeous stall at Chelsea, and so you’re getting the roses for a third of the price. So for me PL (post-Lucy), every FIVE roses from Cottage Memories has cost the same as TWO from David Austin.
Which evens up my purchase graph quite significantly:
Yes, yes, someone is having too much fun with Excel. (Don’t worry, it won’t happen again.)
Now that it’s bare root season, I had my eye on another glorious Peach Melba, perhaps a Jacques Cartier or Louise Odier, all ridiculously well-priced at £11 a pop from Cottage Memories (in case you were wondering on the quality of the previous purchases, they were all excellent.) I realised too, tipped off by my neighbour who dotted his garden with hardwood rose cuttings, that I could double my stock, spending no money at all. (Was I online until past midnight watching a 2018 Monty Don video on propagating rose cuttings? Correct.)
But. To bring me back to my (admittedly attention seeking) title, the problem with David Austin is not only do they exclusively grow some of the roses I love best, but there’s the sheer pleasure of reading their catalogue (such nice paper!), browsing their website (such lovely photography!) and getting to enjoy their beautifully named English roses in the garden. Nancy would throw me into the non-U bin for saying it, but I winced slightly buying roses called ‘As Good as it Gets’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ (I have no beef with either film, but these are not good names for flowers.) Plenty of roses on the Cottage Memories, Peter Beales or Henry Street Nursery website are lovely (particularly the older shrub roses) but some newer varieties have such terrible names that I just can’t give them a home. That said, it’s equally frustrating that two with the loveliest names - Veichenblau and Albertine - do not repeat flower. In a garden this size, I feel they won’t sufficiently pull their weight. Bah.
Cringe-inducing names are not a problem in the David Austin catalogue. After breakfast, the children and I leafed through, pointing out the roses we already have, (‘Mummy, we’ve 'dot that one’) and the ones that I particularly covet. Mia had a go at identifying flowers, largely yelling ‘GAURA!’, her word of the moment. No darling - this one’s Lady of Shallot, this one is Desdemona, that’s Silas Marner, and this one is Young Lycidas. These names are catnip! Even if they do make me think ever so slightly of Benson’s Lucia with her hideously pretentious Shakespeare’s garden.
The problem with David Austin is that the whole setup is precisely tailored to mugs like me, who like 200gsm brochures, think lavender and pale pink is the loveliest colour combination and can’t resist the dreamy photography and spot-on companion planting. (What do we want under our roses? Lavender - Nepeta - Salvia! When do we want it? Yesterday!)
But thanks to Lucy, muggins is ahead of the game. You may have figured this out, but it was a revelation to me: if you’re browsing their website or brochure and there isn’t a (R) trademark, it’s probably not exclusively bred by David Austin which means you can most likely buy it bare root for £11 from Cottage Memories rather than £23. GIRL MATHS - YOU GET TWO FOR ONE. Or you can spend the extra £12 on cut flowers. Surely Nancy would approve?
I hope you enjoyed this amateur gardening post - please do hit the ❤️ for visibility if you did, and have a lovely Sunday! If you’re buying bare root roses this autumn, do share the varieties below - it’s lovely to hear what you’re planting! Mini x
I am an absolute sucker for roses. My mum's garden is full to bursting with them, and I have a terrible David Austin habit too. So what I am sharing now is an anecdote, because I think it's gorgeous and charming, though you may disagree. Rosa Mundi is one of your 'query' roses. Genetically it's a sport of the Apothecary Rose, Rosa Officinalis, which is deep pink without the stripes (Mundi can revert to Officinalis if it gets bored, so sometimes you find it's gone non-stripy).
Derek Jarman, who writes heartbreakingly beautifully about the subject, grew Mundi at Prospect Cottage. He claims it's the rose in the famous medieval poem The Roman de la Rose, by Guillaume de Lorris. It's definitely old enough. And Jarman has this lovely whimsical line about how a crusader brought the rose back from the Crusades for the poet. I totally adore this, because I am imagining (and I assume Jarman is imagining) a rather buff young soldier coming home with a striped rose for his poet boyfriend. Isn't that a fun possibility?
I rent. If I ever get to own my own place with a garden I will have roses, I've been obsessed with them since I was small, as my eccentric Grandad's hyperfocus was roses. It's programmed into my core. For a couple of years I worked in the park office in The Regent's Park and I lived for the season where I would toodle over the road into the rose garden and watch them spring into life and eat my packed lunch surrounded by them.