Hello and welcome to the BBC Gardner's World magazine podcast, brought to you by the team here at the magazine.

Join us as we chat all things gardening with the nation's favourite experts.

Hello and welcome to Garden Favorites with me, Alan Titchmarsh. This is a new series of podcast about some of my favourite things, not whiskers on kittens and brown paper packages tied up in strings, but the plants that I love and think are indispensable in a great garden. You see, everyone gardens differently and has their own favourite

plants to grow. So join me as I share the plants and gardens that have become dear to me

over my gardening years. Strangely enough, the rose is the national flower of the United States of America. What were they

thinking about? I mean, goodness me, it's ours. The rose is British. Well, roses are everybody's

favourite really, aren't there? Well, sometimes not if they're terribly thorny. But just don't go too

closer than they've got lots of thorns. But they do give us a glorious show right the way through the summer into the autumn

if you choose the right varieties. Now, I am a fan of shrub roses, as opposed to the rather

more stocky hybrid teas and floribundas, the bush roses, as we call them. The shrubs are rather larger, rather looser, and more natural,

and they're best in a mixed border where you've got perennials as well.

The rose gardens of old, where we grew them in these islands of grey dust.

Oh no, there should be a thing of the past.

And if you do do that, at least put something underneath them, like hardy geraniums or lavender or violas, just to make sure that you're not gazing on that sea of Dost through the summer and just a few flowers above.

No, for me, roses belong in the mixed border among other things.

And I do not restrict myself to the modern ones which are repeat flowering because some of the old-fashioned shrug roses may flower for one brief season at the end of June and the beginning of July but oh my goodness I wouldn't be without them if I could choose just one it, it would be Charles de Mills. It's a crimson

magenta rose with a flower that looks almost as though it's been sliced off with a pair of scissors

to give it a very complex centre. It has fragrance to die for. It grows about five feet tall and is covered in these crimson magenta flowers for

the end of June and the beginning of July. All right, it's a short liver but goodness me,

you have a bit of history in your garden with it because it was raised in 1790. And what you can do,

if you like, is to train through it a summer flowering clematis, one of the more gentler types like clematis Texensis and let it scramble through the rose bush so that when its own flowers disappear, the clematis flowers take over.

And then at the end of the year, you can chop the clematis right the way down.

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