Single-flowered roses set my toes tapping. They are just as colorful as roses with double flowers—but those doubles don't provide the added appeal of the "boss" (as it's called) of pistols and stamens at the center. With double-flowered roses, more is less.
Here's a famous single-flowered that should be welcome in any garden that's celebrating red. It's Rosa moyesii 'Geranium'. 'Tomato' would be more accurate, but since this rose originated in England way back in the 1930's, when tomatoes—which have to be grown in greenhouses there, and who, in the Depression, could have afforded it?—were probably paler and blander than what we can grow in North America. So 'Geranium' is it.



I have a pair of Geraniums, to anchor a pair of beds in the South Red Garden. (Oh yes, there's another pair of beds in the North Red Garden. It happens.) Young plants, this is their first season of bloom ever. There's a lot of open space in each bed to allow for their mature size, which can be 6 - 8 feet tall and wide. Although the bush is once-blooming, that's not the end of the red by any means: The hips, like little flasks, are red too. (Thank you, www.About-Garden.com, for the glorious picture.)


'Geranium' roses are hard to find, oddly, so thank you North Creek Farm.