First let’s look at the importance of location in choosing where in your yard to plant your roses.

Choosing An Ideal Site For Rose Planting

When finding a place in your yard or on your deck to plant roses, one of your first considerations should be the amount of sun that area receives. Roses like a lot of sunlight, look for an area that gets at least 6 hours of sunlight daily. Even rose plants that are shade-tolerant will do better with more sun.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, and with our cloudy climate and plentiful evergreen trees, it can be hard to find a good sunny place to grow roses. However, if you want your roses to thrive and be easy to grow, take some time to locate a location that will be sunny during as much of the day as possible.

Healthy Soil Makes Healthy Roses

Roses are a flower that need a lot of nutrients from the soil in order to continue to grow and bloom well year-after-year. They also prefer good drainage – a soil without too much clay, too much sand, and just enough organic matter to be spongy and retain water around their roots.

Here’s an easy test you can do to find out if you have clay soil. Grab a ball of dirt in your hand and squeeze it together like a snow ball. If the dirt holds its shape and does not crumble easily – you’ve got clay! Clay is wet in the winter and dry like concrete in the summer. Sandy soil doesn’t hold moisture well at all, so it can tend to be too dry for roses.

No matter what type of soil you have, clay or sand, compost is one of the best soil additives you can offer. If you don’t have your own compost pile to raid to supplement your rose planting site, you can buy bagged or bulk compost at your local garden center – this is an excellent investment and highly recommended.

Who Are Your Roses’ Neighbors?

A final consideration in deciding where to plant your roses is the surrounding plants in the garden. Plants nearby can create shade, rob the soil of moisture and nutrients and create air-circulation problems that are not ideal for roses. Invasive plants like grasses and other shallow-rooted or crawling plants can actually crowd out and suffocate rose bushes if not kept in check. Make sure the plants you choose to keep near your rose bushes keep their distance and have similar soil, sun, and nutrition requirements to your roses. There are many perennials and shrubs that do well in mixed border plantings with roses. Just make sure to keep those plants in check as they grow to make sure that your roses – often not the most vigorous or aggressive growers in the garden – get their fare share of light and space.

Digging the Hole

When you’ve decided where to plant your rose bush, dig a hole or trench, depending on how many roses you’ll be putting in the ground. Dig the hole a little wider and deeper than your roses’ root ball and use a pitch fork to work some compost or other soil additives into the dirt around where your plant’s roots will be. This can also serve to break up the soil and make it easier for the rose roots to get established.

Water the bottom of the hole before you put your rose in, if the soil looks dry. Note how long it takes the water to drain – this is another clue as to whether you have sandy or clay soil.

Once your hole is dug, and your soil additives incorporated into the dirt down there, put a small pyramid of dirt in the bottom of the hole and fan out the rose’s roots across the top of this pyramid. The pyramid should conform to the natural shape of the roots, and give them a good structural foundation to support the plant. You want all the roses’ roots to be in contact with the dirt. Air pockets will dry out the roots and kill them.

Before you start filling in the hole, take a look at where the crown of the rose is, in relationship to the level of the soil. Many roses are grafted – meaning the plant was joined together with a root ball from one plant, and a top stem from another plant. It’s important to place the graft joint carefully so you don’t suffocate the plant, or encourage the root ball to send up its own suckers – of a different kind of rose than you thought you were planting.

Once the rose bush is situated correctly, start filling in the hole with a mixture of compost and water. Pack the soil firmly around the rose’s roots and water it in to eliminate air bubbles as much as possible.
Once the rose bush is situated in the ground and the hole is filled back in, feel free to add a little bark, pine needles or other mulch to the top of the soil to help your newly planted rose retain the water in the soil and to discourage weeds from becoming established in the dirt at the roses’ feet.