Admire 5,000 colourful roses in award-winning castle gardens this month.

The annual Hever in Bloom event, hosted at Hever Castle in Edenbridge, returns with spectacular displays, guided tours and fascinating talks.

Val Bourne, garden writer and organic pioneer, is one of the guest speakers at this year’s festival.

Val, who has been growing roses organically in her garden in the Cotswolds for 17 years, will be taking visitors on tours of the rose garden, the famous childhood home of Anne Boleyn.

She has also shared her secrets to perfecting the growing and maintenance of roses with Vikki Rimmer ahead of this year’s Hever in Bloom event…

WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH BLACKSPOT?

The best way to deal with blackspot, which is a fungal disease, is to select healthy roses in the first place. Certain roses never suffer and they include rambling roses, gallicas, rugosas and albas.

Bomb-proof roses I grow include Kordes’ Champagne Moment and Peach Melba. I also like David Austin’s Wildeve and Lark Ascending, along with Gareth Fryer’s You’re Beautiful.

If you find yourself struggling with blackspot, which is always worse after a damp and muggy summer, pick up all the fallen leaves because they carry spores. You also need to take the weight out of the rose after flowering is finished, usually in November. Take all the foliage off in December and prune carefully in the New Year, taking care to open up the rose so that it forms a cup shape. You then need to mulch around the rose to create a barrier between the soil and the rose stems.

When April comes, feed with a high-potash fertiliser. Careful husbandry pays dividends with all roses. As an organic gardener I will not spray!

WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH GREENFLY OR WHITEFLY ON YOUR ROSES?

The best way to tackle greenfly is to allow your garden predators to clear them up for you. Ladybirds need them and they will only lay their clusters of eggs near aphid colonies. Blue tits also need to collect 10,000 tiny wriggly things for their fledglings.

Don’t spray your aphids, because you will also kill all your predators. The aphids will come back far quicker and there will be nothing to gobble them up.

If aphids on the rose buds are bothering you, rub them away with your fingers. These soft-bodied insects have fragile feeding tubes called stylets and they’re easily damaged.

Whitefly usually arrive later and they are a favourite snack of wrens in my garden. Be tolerant, because insecticides are harmful to human health.

WHICH ROSE BUSHES DO YOU THINK HAVE THE BEST AROMA?

I do love Buff Beauty. This hybrid musk was raised from roses that were originally bred by the Reverend Joseph Pemberton in Romford. After he retired, he devoted his life to selecting fragrant roses. It’s a large rose with reddish foliage and loosely-formed soft-apricot flowers.

Madame Isaac Péreire, a repeat-flowering Bourbon rose, is considered to have the best fragrance. The large, vivid-pink flowers almost make the nose fizz because it’s slightly peppery with hints of spice.

WHICH ROSES HAVE THE PERFECT BLOOMS?

Harkness’s Chandos Beauty is extremely healthy and makes a wonderful cut flower. The scrolled buds open to perfectly-formed flowers in the softest shade of pink and the flowers are fragrant. The glossy foliage is also excellent.

Its close relative Mary Berry (also raised by Harkness) is a lemon-yellow and she’s planted close by in my garden along with German-bred Tantau (a rose from 2005) named Duchess of Cornwall. The olive-green glossy foliage of this rose frames old-fashioned quartered flowers in a warm pink-orange. It repeats well and it’s very prolific and very topical in Coronation year.

WHAT DO YOU PLANT ALONGSIDE THE ROSES TO HELP THEM STAY HEALTHY?

Roses come in flushes, so they are terrific in June and early July and then there’s a gap until late-summer or early autumn, so you must include companion plants as well. I grow lots of lactiflora peonies amidst my roses.

It’s so important in any border to have verticals and, in late-summer, a rambling Japanese anemone named Pamina pops up in the gaps. The rose beds end the season with Gaura and cosmos which go on until November.

Hever in Bloom takes place from Monday, June 19 to Thursday, June 22. You can book Hever Castle entry tickets online here.

The free guided tours take place daily at 11:30am and 2pm.

Botanical workshops with a Hever Castle gardener take place at 11am and 1:30pm daily, and Val Bourne’s talks take place on Tuesday, June 20 at 2pm and Wednesday, June 21 at 11am.