The first thing to secure for your rosary is sun—­sun for all the morning.  If the shadow of house, barn, or of distant trees breaks the direct afternoon rays in July and August, so much the better, but no overhead shade at any time or season.  This does not prevent your protecting a particularly fine quantity of buds, needed for some special occasion, with a tentlike umbrella, such as one sees fastened to the seat in pedlers’ wagons.  A pair of these same umbrellas are almost a horticultural necessity for the gardener’s comfort as well, when she sits on her rubber mat to transplant and weed.

Given your location, consideration of soil comes next, for this can be controlled in a way in which the sun may not be, though if the ground chosen is in the bottom of a hollow or in a place where surface water is likely to settle in winter, you had better shift the location without more ado.  It was a remark pertinent to all such places that Dean Hole made to the titled lady who showed him an elaborately planned rose garden, in a hollow, and waited for his praise.  She heard only the remark that it was an admirable spot for ferns!

If your soil is clayey, and holds water for this reason, it can be drained by porous tiles, sunk at intervals in the same way as meadow or hay land would be drained, that is if the size of your garden and the lay of the land warrants it.  If, however, the roses are to be in separate beds or long borders, the earth can be dug out to the depth of two and a half or three feet, the good fertile portion being put on one side and the clay or yellow loam, if any there be, removed.  Then fill the hole with cobblestones, rubbish of old plaster, etc., for a foot in depth (never tin cans); mix the good earth thoroughly with one-third its bulk of well-rotted cow dung, a generous sprinkling of unslaked lime and sulphur, and replace, leaving it to settle for a few days and watering it thoroughly, if it does not rain, before planting.

One of the advantages of planting roses by themselves is that the stirring of the soil and giving of special fertilizers when needful may be unhampered.

In the ordinary planting of roses by the novice, the most necessary rules are usually the first violated.  The roses are generally purchased in pots, with a certain amount of foliage and a few buds produced by forcing.  A hole is excavated, we will suppose, in a hardened border of hardy plants that, owing to the tangle of roots, can be at best but superficially dug and must rely upon top dressing for its nutriment.  Owing to the difficulty of digging the hole, it is likely to be a tight fit for the pot-bound ball of calloused roots that is to fill it.  Hence, instead of the woody roots and delicate fibres being carefully spread out and covered, so that each one is surrounded by fresh earth, they are jammed just as they are (or often with an additional squeeze) into a rigid socket, and small wonder if the conjunction of the two results in blighting and a lingering death rather than the renewal of vitality and increase.