Miniature roses have many uses in sink or trough gardens, as single specimens, pairs or quadruplets in formal plantings, even hedgerows kept carefully trimmed. I don’t know whether anyone has ever tried them for miniature bonsai. This would be a process of dwarfing a dwarf; and my mental picture of the proper plant, artistically trained, is enchanting. I must try this, before long.
Outdoors, miniature roses are delightful in all kinds of containers—tubs, strawberry jars, window boxes, and other planters. They’re often used as a low hedge to edge a path, driveway, or the beds of a formal rose garden, or around the base of a birdbath or sundial. In mixed flower borders they’re planted singly or in small groups toward the front. In rock gardens they keep most safely cool and moist when planted low, near the base of the garden; and they show off most effectively with something like a dwarf evergreen as background.
Gardens featuring miniature roses are most often formal in design—round, square, rectangular, the beds divided with geometric precision by narrow strips of grass or gravel paths. A small, formal pool or piece of statuary may be the center of interest. In a sunken garden outlined with an eight-inch brick or stone wall, the planting pattern is particularly pleasing. In raised beds each individual shrublet can be enjoyed at eye level. In a single or double row at the base of a low retaining wall, the plants show off to advantage.
Beds of miniature roses can be carefully arranged strips, or groups of separate colors, or mixtures. They can be edged with shrubs such as dwarf box, perennials such as dwarf lavender, dainty annuals such as lobelia or alyssum. In the center a tree or standard is often used as accent. Or a bed may be backed by a wall, fence, trellis, or arch on which miniature climbers are trained. If the soil is slanted slightly up, toward the center, it is easier to see the plump perfection of each little bush.
Dwarf evergreens, particularly junipers, are popular backgrounds for miniature rose gardens. Upright types with symmetrical pyramid, column, or cone shapes are often used as accent—for example, a matching specimen of one of the dwarf varieties of Juniperus communis in the exact center of each formal bed.
Miniature or not, rose gardens are most often conceived in formal design. But to me, the cheerful dwarfs are more friendly when planted informally—popping up at the base of a tree stump or boulder, spotted here and there in the rock garden, a few at the top of a flight of small steps.
TYPES OF MINIATURE ROSES
The tight buds may be as big as the eraser on a pencil, or as tiny as a grain of unpolished rice, and the flowers may be single, semidouble, or double. The doubles may be formed like a hybrid tea or be full-petaled and fluffy, in clusters like a rambler rose. Some varieties stay very dwarf and bushy, from four to six inches tall; others are more robust, with larger flowers, and may grow to ten inches.
Climbing miniature roses are usually sports of bush varieties, with supple canes four or five feet long that can be trained on low fences, walls, trellises, or arches. Otherwise, every part is in perfect miniature scale.
All of these types are recognized by fanciers as authentic miniature roses because they grow on their own roots. And so is the rare tree or standard grown with a single trunk-like stem that is kept free of side growth, then pinched at the top to form a crown and symmetrical head. But standards that are budded or grafted onto the stems of other root stocks (which most of our American miniature tree roses are) are excluded by the experts, which is a matter of concern only to the serious collector.