The rose lends itself to plant breeding as willingly as its cousin the apple, and gardeners have been trying to find the next perfect rose for centuries. In recent years this tinkering has reached a new pitch as breeders, growers and nurseries have frantically sought to reinvent the rose and reshape its image as a sickly and fussy plant.

To a great extent they have succeeded, developing roses that bloom continually into fall and don't need spraying. The shining example is the Knock Out rose, planted by the millions and defining office parks, hotel parking lots and home gardens where the owner doesn't want to fuss with the plant life. Knock Out succeeds wildly as a bulletproof flowering shrub, but the plant is stiff in its habit and the off-key magenta bloom is hard to love. It is not the rose of Shakespeare sonnets.

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So why doesn't everyone have one? They can be hard to find, and they require some work, but the biggest drawback is that they bloom just once a year. A single bower may be in flower for a month, and extravagantly even for a rose, but those attributes don't wash for consumers programmed for ever-blooming roses.

The lateral branches extend 25 feet, and the embrace would be more encompassing if I allowed it. Once the blooms fade, I spend about an hour cutting off all the spent flowers and then 10 minutes once a week through the summer trimming back the vegetative growth to keep it tidy-looking and clear of the adjoining path. Even if I viewed this work as a chore rather than as horticultural therapy, it would still be worth it for the annual display. I don't spray it against black spot or anything else, and the foliage remains clean and disease-free.

One rose lover who needs no convincing is Connie Hilker, who lives in an 1848 brick Gothic house in the Stafford County, Virginia, hamlet of Hartwood. The property, once part of a 1,150-acre antebellum estate, has nine acres of land adorned with old trees and charming outbuildings, and is wrapped in a paddock fence that serves as a gallery wall for her picture-perfect rambling roses.

Hilker, who is on a mission to collect and preserve antique rose varieties in danger of being lost, has a handful of lesser-known roses introduced by the Van Fleet rose's namesake, Walter Van Fleet, including Alida Lovett, which is shell pink, vigorous and less thorny than most.

Behind the house, down the hill past the ancient pecan tree (with a spread of more than 100 feet), she has used the perimeter fence to present other ramblers. Here, she grows them in a more open style in which the lateral branches are fewer but allowed to grow long, and each one is peppered with blooms. Think of them as strings of festive lights, glowing in their rich colors and fragrances. One reason to grow roses laterally rather than just up: Horizontal growth encourages greater flowering along a branch.

She shows me one especially winsome rose, a variety named Leontine Gervais, with semidouble, glowing pink blooms and a conspicuous orange boss of stamens. At just three years in the ground here, it was already more than 40 feet across, though just five feet in height. This is the beauty of ramblers: The gardener determines the height and then lets them spread far and wide.

To grow them so low and openly, Hilker follows a methodical pruning regime. They bloom on canes that developed the year before; the young shoots now growing at the base of the shrub will bear flowers next year. Those that are growing roughly in the right direction will be kept and tethered along the fence, and those that cannot be wrangled will be removed. Espaliered this way, no more than six lateral branches remain on either side. As the new canes are tied and trained, the oldest ones will be removed.

You don't have to be this methodical about the pruning if you want a fuller, wilder look. Having established the lateral growth on my Alexandre Girault, I prune it to the width I want and remove congested canes in the winter. It is trimmed over the summer but I avoid the type of hard pre-spring pruning you would on a shrub rose to keep flower-bearing branches.

If you want a corner of your garden to look romantically brambly, you can do no pruning. This is in play with a fetching feral rose that Hilker has allowed to populate a corner of the property. Named Arcata Pink Globe, it sprawls itself like a languid diva over a fence and adjoining shrubbery. The flowers are four inches across, layered in soft pink petals and sweetly scented. The Arcata Pink Globe is due to be tamed, but Hilker will wait until next winter because it is currently supporting wildlife, including nesting cardinals.

Another way to go wild with ramblers is to allow them to grow into trees, an effect that needs the most robust of the gang. Hilker has American Pillar clambering up a red cedar tree and a Paul's Himalayan Musk lurking in a black cherry tree. Other giants used in this role include the early May-flowering Banksian rose (white and yellow versions), Mrs. Keays's Snowbush and the Kiftsgate rose.

Many ramblers are lax in their petal arrangements and their stems. This to my eye increases their charm, although the floppiness limits their role as cut flowers. In the vase they need propping up and don't last that long. Maybe this is why Hilker prefers the more single and semidouble varieties. I keep meaning to plant the variety Francis E. Lester, which has large single blooms that are soft pink with contrasting yellow stamens. Dortmund is another vigorous scene-setting single bloomer with vibrant red flowers.

The essential consideration when growing ramblers is to make sure the structure they are growing on is strong and large enough for the task. "You see people with wimpy trellises or arches, and the next thing you know you're having to dodge the roses," said Nancy Moitrier, a gardener and landscape designer from Annapolis. "It's terrible if the rose collapses."

This need for heft goes beyond the load-bearing physics and into the realm of design. The supporting structure is the rose's full partner in the performance and together they create the character of their space. "When it's strong enough, it reads as a destination," said Gordon Hayward, a garden designer and author who lives in Putney, Vermont. "That's where a rambling rose comes into play, because nothing beats the drama of the rose."

We left for this hike quite spontaneously after just arriving in the town of El Chaltn. It ended up being one of our favourite treks in Patagonia, with stunning views over Mount Fitz Roy and the beautiful autumn colours all around us.

It was already afternoon when we left El Chalten towards Glacier Torres. The hike went mostly uphill through forest for a bit more than two hours. Many people were coming the other way, going back to El Chalten after a day hike to the glacier.

We knew that the hike was not going to be as solitary as the treks on Isla Navarino or to Cabo Froward but it was comparably calmer and cheaper than Torres del Paine. The access to the trek is free and so are the campsites.

As we packed up our things on the second day, Franziska noticed some small pieces of paper all over her backpack. At a closer look she realised that they came from the small bottle of hand sanitizer that she had left outside her pack. It turned out that a mouse had been busy with the bottle over night. It had bitten its way through the bottle and must have gotten drunk on the high percentage liquid. Even the pieces of plastic on our backpacks were nibbled on. At least we had properly packed our food out of reach.

From the campsite we walked up to a lookout which offered a good view over Glacier and Laguna Torre. Blocks of ice had fallen from the glacier and floated to the coast we were standing on. They were shining in the sun. Some pieces of ice were milky, others transparent like glass, some were deep blue. For a while we just stood there amazed by the different colours and shapes of ice.

We continued our hike towards the campsite Poincenot, first following the path from the day before along Rio Fitz Roy. At one point quite a few hikers stood around taking pictures. As we got closer, we saw what they were looking at: two deer grazing on the other bank of the river. They did not seem to worry about the small crowd of people climbing over the rocks in the river to get closer to them. Just like the many birds we had seen on our hikes in Patagonia, the animals were in no way as afraid of humans as animals tend to be in European forests.

The route lead us along two beautiful lagoons Hija and Madre. Around them trees were in full autumn colours, bright red and yellow. Behind the lagoons Mount Fitz Roy with its rugged shape slowly came into sight.

In the early afternoon we reached the campsite Poincenot. It had many well constructed walls of wood built by campers to protect their tents from the heavy winds. We put up our tent behind one of these walls and spent the afternoon reading in the sun. Carefully we stored all our belongings away to avoid another mice attack and then went to sleep.

The next morning, we got up while it was still dark outside. Only with the light of our head lamps we walked to the view point over Mount Fitz Roy. It took us almost an hour and a half of walking uphill. Luckily the route was clear but with some strong winds it was a challenge to climb up the steep track. Almost half way up the hill we saw the first thin line of red light appearing above the hills behind us.

We watched the spectacle of the sunrise from behind some big rocks, trying to hide from the strong, icy winds. While we were up on the view point the wind got stronger and stronger. So we hid behind the rocks only to peak out now and again to see how the colours were changing.

The walk back down was more difficult than coming up. Although we could now see much more around us, the wind had become very strong and wild. On the steeper parts we were desperately looking for rocks or vegetation to hold on to, so that we would not be blown off the mountain. 152ee80cbc

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