decorative screen
By Snookshome
United Kingdom 
I have a neighbour overlooking my garden. I want to screen her from viewing our garden but provide her with a decorative outlook. I would like to use roses but as they are deciduous would like to plant them large containers with an evergreen, for example a camelia, with the camelia growing up a narrow trellis and a tall growing rose adjacent, sharing a trough about 18" X 30" by 18". Will it work ?
28 Aug, 2008
Camellias are bushy shrubs, they can't really be trained up a trellis, I don't think. One would grow happily in ericaceous compost in your trough for a few years but its roots would spread as it grew bigger and get tangled with the rose. Then when you needed to take the Camellia out for re-potting or planting in the ground you would have real problems. Now to the rose - I don't think that it would be happy in the same compost. Roses are greedy feeders and I plant mine in the ground in a mixture of home-made compost with plenty of well-rotted manure dug in, then they are mulched every spring with the same. Climbing roses also need to be trained with their new shoots tied in horizontally to encourage flowering from new growth - 30" is not really wide enough to do this. May I suggest that you consider something else? Perhaps evergreen Clematis might fit the bill - Clematis cirrhosa (several different ones) are evergreen and flower in the winter - what a bonus! You could pair it with a summer flowering one and plant up your trough below with different plants for each season. The Clematis will still need feeding but this can be liquid feed which the plants underneath would appreciate too. I do hope that this will help you with the screening. Not what you wanted to hear, I know.
28 Aug, 2008