The first rose to bloom in my garden is Rosa xanthina f. hugonis, syn. ‘Father Hugo’s Rose’ — the golden rose of China, as it’s sometimes called. I just call it Father Hugo — like a comforting old friend.

Every year this yellow rose surprises me with how very many buds appear on its long arching canes, how quickly the buds develop, and how very showy those pale gold cups of flowers are during their brief time of bloom. The leaves and buds are tiny, compared to many rose bushes; yet the flowers are relatively large although they’re single.

Yes, it’s an old-fashioned rose.

If memory serves, Father Hugo’s rose was written up with enthusiasm by gardeners as a new discovery just before the First World War: and who Father Hugo might have been, I have no idea. It’s not well known these days, giving way in popularity to the new and improved varieties with a longer blooming period and a tidier habit of growth.

True, this is not a rose for every garden or every gardener.

Winter wind and ice is hard on Father Hugo, breaking the long canes, and it sprawls around and spreads those long canes like a skirt on the ground. Use mulch, if you don’t want a constant battle to trim the edge of the lawn around it, the way my rose edges into lawnmower territory in its growth. The thorns are like organic barbed wire, too, so pruning back the dead wood in the spring is not a whole lot of fun.

But it’s all worth it for the early pale gold cascades of roses… lovely!

My rosa hugonis grows well on a gentle sunny slope at the edge of the driveway– it doesn’t seem to need very rich soil at all, fortunately — where it can tumble around at will. In a small garden, however, I think I’d be inclined to experiment with an espalier against a fence or wall.

The panicled Hydrangea may be slow to leaf out in the spring, compared to other popular shrubs for the northern garden. Once it gets started, however, Hydrangea paniculata puts on an everchanging show until the snow falls… and beyond.

From a mass of lush dark green foliage, the shrub blooms with loose cone-shaped clusters of small white flowers that are intensely attractive to beneficial pollinating insects, such as honeybees.

As the flowers age, the white takes on a delicate pink hue, darkening with the first frosts to a lovely dusty-rose. The flowers have the added bonus of drying well and retaining their colour for off-season bouquets of dried flowers.

It’s a hardy old-fashioned shrub that can easily be trained to a standard — the shape of a small tree, with one central stem — and it’s very tolerant of pruning at most times of the season.

“PeeGee” hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora) is the most common cultivar but many lovely varieties are readily available and equally well suited to our tough eastern Canadian climate.

For autumn colour in the garden, it’s hard to find better than the rich burgundy-red foliage of Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia).

We grow this versatile vine on a rustic cedar trellis (that’s it in the photo) to screen the view of our house from the neighbouring barnyard — but it also looks beautiful when grown as a groundcover plant, tumbling down a sunny hillside or over a low rock wall.

Hardy and practically pest-free in our Atlantic Canadian climate, the Virginia Creeper quickly grows to 30 feet or more. Keep it away from the base of valuable trees and shrubs or it can overwhelm them. The vine’s thick growth of grapevine-like tendrils and compound leaves provide safe cover for birds, however, and bees visit its late-summer flowers, while a number of bird species eat the small purple berries that ripen in the fall.