While wild dog roses have tiny, delicate pink or white blooms with just a few petals, garden roses tend to have large, many-petalled blooms in bright colours ranging from deep reds to purples and even blues. Wild roses also tend to have far fewer flowers and many more leaves than garden roses. Clary is a biennial with scented leaves grown for use in perfumes and to brighten garden borders. The Canterbury bell is one of many bellflowers grown in gardens. Carnations are popular as cut flowers because they last a long time once cut.
Roses are the most widely grown of all flowering shrubs.
There are at least 13,000 identifiable varieties. As farms and buildings take over more land, there are fewer places for wild flowers to grow and some have become very rare. A few are so rare that they must be protected by law, such as the lady's slipper orchid which now grows in only one place in Yorkshire. Every kind of place has its own range of wild flowers. On heathlands, for instance, you may see purple blooms of bell-heather, yellow gorse and scarlet pimpernel.