If your vision of a Southern rose garden is perfumed, velvety petals in a sun-drenched setting, you share something in common with Judy Fitzgerald. At least that was the image in her head when she moved with her husband, Bill, from Quebec, Canada, to Apex, North Carolina.
With her friend and mentor Bridget Hutchison, a Quebec garden designer who divides her time between Quebec and Raleigh, Fitzgerald learned to adjust her gardening techniques to her new latitude. With little working knowledge of North Carolina's humid climate, clay soil, and sometimes inhospitable environment, the two were determined to bring the dream of a civilized rose garden to fruition. "I had never heard of Japanese beetles before moving to North Carolina," says Fitzgerald, "but not even those notorious creatures could have prevented me from planting purple-leaf plums, crab apple trees, weeping cherries, crepe myrtles, and, of course, roses." Her objective: European-flavored garden rooms with formal parterres and frothy rose bushes.
But when they began to carve into the sloping lot to create flat terraces for garden rooms, the women were confronted with drainage problems. "Our property kept its secret of Triassic clay soil until we began serious digging," Fitzgerald says. "We discovered this particular clay was totally nonporous. In the rainy season of fall, our garden was literally floating."
To correct the problem, the roses were removed, and a drainage system was installed using landscape fabric, corrugated plastic pipe, and quite a few loads of gravel. When the rose beds were rebuilt, the flowers flourished in well-fertilized top soil and finely ground pine bark. Suddenly, English shrub roses, which the two women could only coax to 5 or 6 feet tall in Canada, reached 12 feet tall in North Carolina's long growing season.
After battling the rampant growth of these roses for several years, the women replaced most of them with smaller varieties of David Austin roses and hybrid teas. David Austin, a British breeder, has created a class of hybrid roses that combines the charm of old-fashioned roses with the repeat blooms of more modern hybrid teas. These roses also handle the Southern summers with few complaints.
The design of the garden is characterized by relaxed plantings within a more formal framework. Parterres extend a proper greeting to front-door visitors. The courtyard is composed of diamond-shaped beds edged with low clipped hedges of boxwood and dwarf yaupon hollies. Rose standards surrounded by dusty miller fill the central beds. Assorted hybrid teas and David Austin selections in the pink-red range fill the smaller truncated diamond beds around the perimeter.
The back garden is also laid out as a series of rooms divided by hedges and brick walls. Six lattice towers with chain swags strung between them form an elegant rose trellis. In mid-May, 'New Dawn' and 'Constance Spry' climbers create spectacular confectionary garlands that befit this garden's romantic cottage style.
Fitzgerald's garden is reminiscent of the famous rose garden at Bagatelle in Paris, designed in 1906 and home to around 1,000 varieties. The size of her lot could not accommodate that many selections, but this garden is just as lavish with more than 200 bushes, inspiring the name "Rosecroft."
"The design of the garden is most formal at the front and gets more loose as you move toward the back of the property," Fitzgerald says. Informal borders are filled with soft perennials such as foxgloves, cranesbill, iris, lamium, dianthus, and more roses. "I encourage people to grow roses in all sorts of settings," she says. "You can use roses in the border as a focal point. They don't have to be stuck out in a bed by themselves."
Although not part of the original design, a pool and its surrounding brick terrace were deftly worked into the garden plan and the natural lake setting beyond. "It was important to Bill that we preserve the distant view of the lake, so the pool is placed down a level to allow us to see over it from the house," Fitzgerald explains.
She revels in the opportunity to talk with other rosarians during the garden tours that frequently include her as a stop. But she's not likely to be spotted at any official rose gatherings outside of Rosecroft. "I never go to rose society meetings," Fitzgerald says. "I'm too busy weeding."
