The old party trick of rubbing a comb or a pen with flannel, or a stick of sealing wax with silk, and making small pieces of paper leap up to attach themselves. This is caused by static electricity.

Roses prefer a dense soil to a light sandy one with no body in it, but that doesn’t mean that they will thrive in a heavy, sticky, badly drained, airless soil, which probably explains your clay exactly.

You may have heard of the use of ‘Nottingham marl’ in the preparation of cricket pitches, and the excellence of Nottingham’s Trent Bridge ground. Marl is a dense clay that does not settle into a wet, soggy mess like ordinary clay. Some of the finest rose growers in the world are to be found around Nottingham, and you would be right in thinking that there must be a connection between the two facts.

Your clay is an excellent raw material for growing good roses. What you need to do is to turn your heavy sticky stuff into a little Nottingham by converting it into marl. How you can do this depends on understanding why clay behaves as it does - and then tackling the cause.

With the naked eye, most gardeners can see individual grains of sands, but the size of the particles that constitute clay are so small that a microscope is needed in order to see them. The remarkable fact is that these clay-sized particles only need to constitute some 30 per cent of a soil sample for that soil to have the characteristics of a clay - heavy, wet, poorly drained, sticky and difficult to work with.

Your clay will remain as infertile as the road outside, and that is where you may as well put down your feeds for all the good they will do.