Val Bourne is surprised to find a pink rose throwing out blooms late in the year

I always have a look around the garden between Christmas and New Year and, thanks to a mild period, I found some of my summer-flowering plants were still lingering on.

One surprise was the pink rose ‘Bonica’, looking slightly incongruous among perennials dying back for winter.

‘Bonica’ is capable of thriving on poor soil. It did well in my stony garden at Hook Norton, where roses usually failed, so when I moved I planted more at Spring Cottage.

‘Bonica’ was bred in France by Meilland and launched in 1982, so it’s modern. Yet its flowers have an old-fashioned quality with small buds that open to form a rounded flower.

Then the loosely packed petals unfurl to reveal a boss of bee-friendly golden stamens. The fragrant flowers come in clusters of seven, nine or more, and open at varying stages to create the impression of abundance. Most blooms come in late June, slightly later than many roses, but 'Bonica’ carries on throwing out a few blooms until very late in the year.

Its lineage includes the glossy-leaved, healthy Rosa wichurana. This trailing evergreen rose, introduced in 1891 from Japan, is also present in many healthy ramblers with an evergreen tendency. The foliage of Bonica is glossy, with a reddish tinge when young, and this compliments the pale-pink flowers and also seems to shrug off disease. As a result ‘Bonica’ has been used in many breeding programmes.

David Austin raised the apricot-pink ‘Wildeve’, another rose that does well for me. Peter Beales raised ‘Macmillan Nurse’, a small, modern shrub rose with cream-white flowers tinged with peach. It’s one of his best roses.

Another lingerer, Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’, was still flowering just about. This new perennial was bred by Tim Crowther of Walberton Nurseries, West Sussex in 1988. He crossed G. coccineum (a summer-flowering orange species from the Balkans) with G. rivale (a dull pink spring-flowering species found in cool, boggy parts of the world) in an attempt to produce a shortish geum.

He aimed to create different colours so he crossed the best seedlings with G. chiloensis from Chiloe off Chile. The red ‘Mrs Bradshaw’ and the yellow ‘Lady Stratheden’ are both named hybrids.

Three were selected by Tim, but two proved too similar to existing cultivars. The third was different though, a frilly soft tangerine orange he called ‘Totally Tangerine’.

This was entered into The Plant of the Year competition at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2010 by Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants. Unfortunately it was beaten by a streptocarpus, a gaura and a lady’s slipper orchid.

I say this with feeling as I was on the voting panel. ‘Totally Tangerine’ didn’t get into the top three and yet it’s one of the finest garden plants to emerge in recent years. ‘Totally Tangerine’ sends up its wiry stems in late April or early May and continues until October or November.

It’s prolific partly because it’s sterile, probably due to the fact that three closely related species were involved. This often causes sterility, due to pollen incompatibility. Several hardy geraniums, including the gentian-blue ‘Orion, the mid-blue ‘Rozanne’ and the back-eyed magenta ‘Patricia’, are sterile and therefore long flowering.

The most enduring woodland geum is the bright-pink ‘Bell Bank, bred by the late Geoffrey Smith when he was superintendent of the Harlow Carr Gardens near Harrogate in Yorkshire in the 1980s and named this after his private garden.

He crossed G. rivale with G. Borisii to produce a large-flowered geum. Although thought lost, the owners of the Yorkshire nursery Dove Cottage, Stevie, Kim and Katie Rogers, still grew ‘Bell Bank’ and relaunched it.

Find more details at dovecottagenursery.co.uk or 01422 203553.