As you are reading this, the tills in florist's shops all over Ireland are playing a happy Valentine's Day tune, beeping and dinging their way through several millions of pounds. Before you go out to join the dutiful queue, know this: if you're planning to treat your loved one to, say, a dozen red roses, it will set you back between £25 and £75.
Many of the red roses being presented in this country today are grown in the high, fertile plateaux of Colombia, close to Bogota. After Holland, Colombia is the world's largest producer of cut flowers: only coffee, bananas and illegal drugs are more profitable export crops. Your Valentine roses are grown outdoors, where the generally clement, equatorial conditions allow the blooms to be produced throughout the year, although on some nights the farmers have to light bonfires so that the temperature does not drop below 4 Celsius. After harvesting and grading, the roses are brought to El Dorado International Airport in Bogota and flown to Miami. From there, they are air-freighted around the world by big distributors, to finally land in the flower shop, usually via an Irish wholesaler. All those middle-men explain why, today, some folks are shelling out £6 for a single red rose - with no scent.
It would be far more romantic, to my mind, to turn up at your loved one's door with bag of wellrotted manure and a rose bush (or a dozen), thus ensuring a supply of thousands of long-stemmed red roses for many years to come. And, with many bare-rooted roses costing under a fiver each, you can afford to include a bottle of champagne for post-planting refreshment.
If it's single blooms on long stems that you're after, then chose a hybrid tea rose. The first hybrid teas appeared around the middle of the last century, and were the result of crossing the daintily scented and rather delicate tea roses with the more muscular hybrid perpetuals. Nowadays, new hybrid teas are bred from crosses within the hybrid tea pool, and every year more and more are introduced to commerce.
At last, breeders have realised that a home-grown rose that doesn't have a scent isn't worthy of the name (or our money). Consequently, there are countless hybrid teas that not only have luscious, velvety blooms, but are loaded with sensual perfume. They include the carmine-red `Deep Secret' and the crimson `Papa Meilland', another gorgeously scented rose, which was raised in France by Meilland, the breeders who created the most popular hybrid tea rose ever, `Peace' - launched in the USA in 1945 to commemorate the end of the second World War. And widely available is the best-selling, if only slightly fragrant, deep blood-red `Ingrid Bergman', bred by the Danish nursery, Poulsen.
Or, if the somewhat stiff and formal habit of the hybrid tea rose isn't your thing, then what about the dusty, pinky-purple `William Lobb', a tall moss rose (up to 10 feet) whose buds and flower stalks are clothed in scent-bearing glands that look like moist moss? Or what about any of the deep pink or purple Gallica roses, such as `Cardinal de Richelieu' or `Charles de Mills'? The Gallicas were bred from the wild Rosa gallica (a variant of which is the Apothecary's Rose, or the Red Rose of Lancaster), and many of them keep their scent after the petals have dried.
But whatever rose you offer your Valentine (and doggedly literal types can't go wrong with the pink, cluster-flowered `Valentine Heart'), you need to get it off to a really good start. Roses like a sunny position (but not baked against a south-facing wall) and - this is important - they must not be grown where roses have grown before.
Rose sickness, also known as specific replant disease, often occurs when you plant a new rose on the same site as a previous one, even if the old one was in the pink of health when you removed it. Microscopic organisms from the old rose's roots cause the fresh rose to grow stunted and poorly. If you must plant where a rose lived before, you must replace all the soil for a width and depth of at least 15 inches. (In the international rose trial beds at St Anne's Park, Raheny the soil is removed after each two-year trial to a depth of some feet.)
And so to plant: if your rose is bare-rooted, cut off the wrapper and remove any broken or damaged wood, and shorten any long, tough roots. Then soak it in a bucket of water while you are digging its new home - which should be at least a foot deep and a few inches wider than the root-spread. Loosen the subsoil and throw in some manure. After covering the manure with some soil, place the rose in the hole, spread the roots out and fill in with a mixture of soil, organic compost and a handful of bonemeal.
And when that's done, crack open the champagne, and raise a glass to years of florist-free flowers.
Diary Date: next Saturday, February 21st, 3 p.m. Rose-pruning demonstration, in conjunction with the Royal National Rose Society, at Hosford's Geraniums and Garden Centre, Cappa, Enniskeane, Co Cork. Rose experts will be on hand to give help with all rose-related matters.