Red Flowers in a Green Garden

The Willow Tree Garden is primarily a leafy, shrubby, green garden, but some of my most beautiful red flowering plants grow here. Pride of place in mid-summer is taken by a clump of hybrid large red daylilies.

Red Large Flowering Daylilies

To think that I dug these out by mistake and threw them under the hedge to turn into compost! I didn't realise my mistake until over a year later, when the lucky survivors turned out to be species orange daylilies. Oops!

Lucky Daylilies!

Phew - I dug into my messy pre-compost and rescued the real ones - just in time. They are an amazing shade of red.

Hot Chocolate Rose?

Sunny Roses and Perennials

Rhododendrons fill up the shady places in the Willow Tree Garden, but there are still many sunny spots for flowers and perennials. In there I grow some of my favourite red roses.

Almost Red

One is an almost-red, a mixture of red and burnt orange. I think it's called Hot Chocolate. Hmm... Am I right? I love this rose, and it flowers later in the season when other roses have been dead-headed. Well, when other roses are supposed to have been dead-headed...

A Cardinal!

There's a cherry red rose which grows by the honeysuckle - I'm sure it has 'Cardinal' in its name. Anyway, I've always known it as 'Cardinal Someone-Or-Other' - maybe it's time for an attempt at positive identification. Be patient... These things take time...

Other good red rosed in this garden are Opulence and a single red rose branded under the Flower Carpet label. It's a wonderful low spreading rose with the thorniest canes, impossible to weed anywhere near. Ouch!

Single Red Rose - 2003

Some years ago I collected seedlings off the beautiful red dahlia with purple foliage called Bishop of Llandaff - just to see what would happen. My new plants missed out on the leaves, but their flowers are just as beautiful as the original.

My Seedling Dahlia

And naturally there are a couple of dark red Phormiums (though they're a dark wine red variety) and a red Berberis shrub to bind the flowers to the rest of the foliage.