When planting roses, you may want to avoid planting only that type of flower in your garden, because that could actually put the entire garden at risk. When only one species of plant exists in a garden or other location, all of the plants could be affected if a disease occurs with nothing to buffer them or prevent its spread. So prudent flower gardening might dictate that you don’t restrict the garden to just roses, but plant other flowers as well.

When you think of planting roses along with other flowers, though, you have to take new factors into consideration. One of those will be height. For example, floribunda roses generally don’t grow much higher than two or three feet. You likely wouldn’t want to choose petunias as their companions, unless you pick a variety that grows along the ground, because you’re likely to get nothing but a big mash-up of flowers. You might prefer to put something like alyssum below the floribundas instead.

You could arrange different configurations for the bushes as well. For example, by planting roses closer together and trimming the foliage in certain ways, you can create a rose hedge. If you line your sidewalks with hedges like these, even going out for a walk would feel (and smell!) like a small stroll through a bower. Setting roses to climb a fence behind some lower annuals in beds around the edges of the yard could also add extra beauty to your garden design.

There are also some relatively shade tolerant types of roses that you could plant in different places than usual, though even these would always need a certain amount of sunlight. And you’d always have to remember that any annuals you placed in and among your taller roses would still need to be planted as seedlings rather than just planting the seeds and waiting for them to grow in time. You can experiment with all sorts of companions and configurations when planting roses with other flowers or finding creative ways to arrange the roses themselves. You can help reduce the risk of all your roses succumbing to pests or disease, and create a lush arrangement of many different types of flowers at the same time.

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