6 Climbing Roses That Thrive on North-Facing Brick Walls

A north wall is not the death sentence people treat it as. The varieties below were bred or selected for low light, and the difference between a healthy one and a sulking one is almost never the rose. It is the 30cm strip of dry, root-filled rubble that runs along the base of most brick walls.

Start with the wall itself. Old brick wicks moisture out of the soil at its foot, and the overhang of coping or guttering keeps rain off entirely. Dig a planting hole at least 45cm out from the brick face, not tight against it. The roots want to travel away from the wall, into open ground that actually gets rained on. Lean the plant back toward the wall at a 30 to 45 degree angle so the canes reach the wires.

The six that earn their place

Madame Alfred Carriere is the one most north-wall growers reach for first. A Noisette from 1879, creamy white with a pink flush, vigorous to 5m, and it flowers repeatedly through the season even with two hours of sun. It tolerates poor soil better than almost any other climber and shrugs off blackspot in conditions that flatten hybrid teas.

Zephirine Drouhin is the thornless Bourbon, cerise-pink, scented, good for an archway or a doorway where you brush past it. It does get mildew in still air, so it wants a wall with some air movement, not a sheltered corner.

New Dawn is a pale pink rambler-climber bred in 1930, the first plant ever to hold a US plant patent. It will cover 4m of wall and keeps producing flowers after the main June flush, which is more than most ramblers manage.

Danse du Feu gives you red on a north wall, which is rare. It is shorter, around 2.5m, useful where you cannot fit a giant.

Gloire de Dijon, another old Noisette, runs to buff-apricot and copes with cold brick well.

The sixth is Mortimer Sackler from David Austin, a soft pink English climber that holds up in shade and repeats reliably. Austin lists it as shade-tolerant in their own catalogue, which is not a claim they hand out freely.

Getting water to the roots without daily effort

The base of a north wall dries out faster than open border soil, and a hose-once-a-week habit fails in the first dry spell because the water runs off the crusted surface before it soaks down. A length of drip irrigation line, the 16mm Hozelock or Gardena kits with inline emitters every 30cm, fixes this. Run it along the planting line, peg it down, and cover it with mulch so the sun does not cook the tubing.

Set emitters to deliver slowly. A rose wants a deep soak that reaches 25 to 30cm down once or twice a week, not a daily sprinkle that wets the top 5cm and trains the roots upward where they bake. On a timer running off a tap, 40 minutes twice a week through summer is a reasonable starting point for a 16mm line with 2 litre-per-hour emitters, then adjust by digging a finger in.

If the wall sits a long way from any tap, a rainwater harvesting setup pays off. A 200 litre water butt off the downpipe gives you gravity-fed water that roses prefer to chlorinated mains, and a butt-mounted pump or a simple drip kit teed off the bottom outlet covers two or three plants without you carrying cans. The catch worth knowing: butt water at low pressure will not push through pressure-compensating emitters, so use plain drip line or open-orifice emitters on a gravity feed.

Mulch depth, and why people get it wrong

The RHS guidance on mulch is 5 to 7.5cm of organic matter, kept clear of the stems. People hear mulch and pile it against the base of the rose, which rots the bark and invites canker right at the union. Leave a 5cm collar of bare soil around each cane.

Use it in early spring once the soil has warmed and is moist, not on dry ground, because a thick mulch over dry soil seals the drought in. Composted bark, leaf mould, or well-rotted manure all work. On a north wall the mulch does double duty: it slows evaporation from that fast-drying strip and it feeds the soil that the brick keeps stripping nutrients from.

Pruning a wall-trained climber

Forget the hard pruning you do on bush roses. A climber trained on wires gets its framework canes tied in roughly horizontal, because bending a cane toward horizontal forces flowering shoots all along its length instead of just at the tip. Vertical canes flower only at the top and leave the bottom of the wall bare.

For cutting, a pair of Felco bypass pruners earns its keep here. The Felco 2 is the standard, but if your hands are smaller the Felco 6 has a narrower handle span and the Felco 9 is the left-handed version, a detail people only discover after buying the wrong one. Bypass blades, not anvil, because anvil pruners crush a rose cane and leave a ragged wound that dies back. Keep the blade sharp enough to slice a stem cleanly at a 45 degree angle just above an outward-facing bud.

In winter, take out the oldest one or two main stems at the base on an established plant to push new growth, shorten the side shoots that flowered to two or three buds, and tie in the new long canes you want to keep. On Madame Alfred Carriere and New Dawn, which throw very long growth, you will be tying in 2m of new cane a year and there is no shortcut to doing it by hand.

One thing about the soil before you plant

Never plant a new rose where an old rose just died. Rose replant disease will stunt it for years. Dig out a barrowload of the old soil and swap in fresh from elsewhere in the garden, or change the variety to something unrelated.

A worked watering example

Say you have three roses along a 4m north wall, fed from a single 200 litre butt. Each established climber wants roughly 20 to 30 litres a week in a dry July, so three plants need around 75 litres a week, splitting into two soaks. That is two 38 litre draws on the butt. A full butt covers nearly three weeks of dry weather with no rain refilling it, which in a British summer it usually does before then.

Run open-orifice drip line, not pressure-compensating, because the head of water in a butt sitting on two breeze blocks gives you maybe 0.3 bar, well below the 1 bar that compensating emitters need to regulate. Tee the line off the bottom tap, lay three loops of 30cm around each rootball, and let it trickle for an hour. Check the depth with a trowel after the first run and lengthen or shorten the time from there. The numbers are a starting frame, not a rule, because a sandy soil drains in half the time a clay one does.

The variety lists for north walls all converge on the same handful of Noisettes and old climbers, which raises a question none of the catalogues answer: why so few modern breeding programmes have bothered to select for genuine deep shade, when half the walls in any terraced street face north.