Rose week

Fill your world with bewitchingly beautiful roses during Belfast’s annual Rose Week. The ever-popular celebration of our favourite flower takes place at the International Rose Garden at Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park, one of the world’s leading rose gardens. During the festival the park fills with over 20,000 magnificent blooms, filling the air with colour and scent.

It’s a great way of comparing new varieties and finding out about the wonderful world of roses ancient and modern: the event is also the occasion for the City of Belfast International Rose Trials, a mecca for top breeders from all over the world to showcase their latest discoveries, so you’ll be looking at the very latest and best varieties. With that and the Summer Rose and Flower Show at the weekend you’ll have a notebook packed with roses which catch your eye: drop into the garden centre here in Co. Limerick once you get back and we’ll help you fill your own garden with a riot of summer colour.

Just to get you ready, here’s our guide to some of the main groups of roses you can expect to see:

• Shrub roses: Old-fashioned and ‘wild’ varieties of rose which flower just once – but very spectacularly
• Hybrid tea roses: The most widely grown category of large-flowered, often highly perfumed shrubs
• Climbing roses: Traditionally used to cover walls and rose arches, making a woody permanent framework of stems covered in flowers
• Rambling roses: More vigorous than climbers, with shoots growing mainly from the base of the plant, with smaller but more abundant flowers.
• Patio roses: dwarf varieties growing no more than 2ft high and ideal for containers.
• Ground cover roses: Low-growing, spreading roses producing a carpet of colour across the ground.

Rose Week takes place from 16-22 July: for more details visit www.belfastcity.gov.uk.