A garden visitor

Let me first say that nothing exciting ever happens to me…until today.

The wider view

Today after circumnavigating the garden and taking 427 photos I finally seemed to see the whole of it. I went to different corners than usual and found different sights, different pleasures.



Not feeling inspired to do more deadheading, I just sat on this bench with my netbook editing photos in the glorious, breezy 84-degree shade and enjoying the garden immensely until 4 o’clock when the hot sun found me.



From this peaceful nook the garden can be breathed in with no notice of the outside world. I think most of the hard-labor days in this garden may be behind me. Of course, not all, but I find myself just as fervently seeking out this spot as I did the next project. Today’s project was pure enjoyment – and that’s all.



From the back door ‘Mrs. B R Cant’ was looking so strong, fighting a good fight against the thrips.



She is becoming a real presence in her corner of the garden, relishing her cool shade.



This is the best she has ever looked. It’s been five years. That’s hard for me to believe. I had to subtract twice – 2007 from 2012. That’s five, right? How time flies, but for Mrs B R she’s just coming into her own.



I loved this new view of her from the bench.



She is the belle of the garden. There’s no question.




The new chick in town, however, is ‘Pat Austin’, and she made quite a splash today.








Not too shabby for the third bloom of a pretty flimsy potted rose. She had me at hello.

One for the road...or maybe five

'Capitaine Dyel de Graville', 1905, Bourbon

(L to R) 'La Sylphide', 1842, Tea and  'Louis Philippe', 1834, China

NOID

'Madame Abel Chatenay', 1894, Hybrid Tea (with a little bit of thrips damage)

'Madame Lombard', 1878, Tea

Back garden eyesore - Part I

My back garden looked pretty good last May 2nd, the day of my open garden. I won't exactly say it's been downhill from there but almost. There have been many changes to this garden since then. Roses are bigger, roses are gone, new roses have come, plants have frozen back and not returned as promised, and some unsightly stuff is now visible that was hidden. The eyesore is a very small part of the whole but a very ugly part, and I feel it has a large impact on the feeling of this garden. It hurts my feelings every single day.

I think you'll be able to feel the garden if I can place you in the garden. So imagine you're the little man in the Google Street View. Keeping in mind, of course, that nature and this gardener have made some changes. Take your time. I'll keep quiet except for directions.

From the house look north

 Walk out behind the bench, turn around and look toward the house.

Turn to the right and walk west just a few steps, look back to the house.

 Walk forward, looking to the right as you go.

 Keep walking to the corner of the house and turn to the left. Now you're facing east.

 

 Walk toward the bench, stop at the stepping stones and look right.

Walk past the bench, turn left at the potted plants and do a 180. You're looking south. The future eyesore is on your left.

 Step back a little and look left at the tidy, well hidden storage area.

 Look right at the shade garden, my pride and joy - foliage texture and color.

Pivot left a bit, walk back toward the house, stop next to the pots.

Look to the left at the nice bamboo screen, Mona lavenders and a Walters Viburnum in a shady grotto under three oak trees that only gets late afternoon sun.

Turn right toward the house, bear left and stop under the rebar arbor.

Turn around, the eyesore is behind Louis Philippe and Fortuniana (climbing the oak tree on the left).

Look to the right. The shed is the end of the road, er, gravel path.

Turn around, look south toward Reve d'Or and all the way at the end is Maman Cochet, Cl.

Bear right, then look left under the arbor.

Now go back to the red bench, sit in the shade, and I'll get you an iced tea. Sweet or unsweet?

While you sip your tea, I'll tell you my problem. No, better yet, we'll fast forward, and I'll show you my problem... So much for bamboo screens. It lasted six months. And Mona Lavender doesn't like freezing temps - at all.

Isn't this embarrassing?

Can this ever be a pretty part of the garden? Stay tuned to Part II. I think I have a plan.

Saying Goodbye to 2010

I think it's fair to say that 2010 was an excellent year in my garden mainly because most everything was gaining some maturity. In other words the garden no longer looked like it should have been stamped 'Under Construction' (well, most of it anyway). 

The year started out with outrageous hard freezes and is ending the same way. January's freezes gave me several 50-cent flats of dianthus and pots of plumbago courtesy of Lowe's clearance racks, and I think the freezes may be the ones I need to thank for almost no thrips last spring.  This sad view from January 26th shows burned out liriope and barely visible rose bushes still fitting into their 2009-size clothes.

February and March brought my micro irrigation system which, if nothing else, taught me that even the most frustrating and painful experiences can be godsends. I lost my temper so many times while trying to punch holes in that 1/2" poly tubing. Arrrgh! But this year I have "a tool" that should make it easier to do the planned improvements to the system which absolutely made my roses happier with daily morning watering. Here's a photo of the front garden on March 15th. You can see the old soaker hoses waiting for the trash man and a few of the new sprinklers. You can also see the garden just waking up, having been fed, composted and mulched, but it seemed like last spring would never arrive!

 

On May 1st I had my first Open Garden, taking a week's vacation to get the garden meticulously prepared and as perfect as it had ever been. Very gratifying and very exhausting. During the week before absolutely everything was in bloom, on April 30th less was blooming, and on May 1st the temperature shot up over 90 - so much for a cool spring stroll through the garden. 'Louis Philippe' looked fabulous...the week before.

 As did the tea rose, 'Mrs. B. R. Cant'.

 

But it was a lovely day, and most of the garden was showing its stuff very prettily.

The back garden didn't get enough attention or the right companion plants in 2010. It's hoping I'll treat it with more love next year.

 

 Later in May 'Red Cascade' was showing off, and Ellie is camera shy.

The companion plants that I had set out before spring broke were my pride and joy this year. They filled the spaces between the roses perfectly and gave it the cottage garden look that I have come to love. I splurged on dozens of evergreen reblooming daylilies in the fall of '09. They were fantastic even in their first year. The mounding dianthus is a wonderful plant in my garden, effected not at all by 20 degree temps or even 95 degree days. They disguise the brown mulch with a lovely bright green. Very pleasing! The tall dianthus thrilled me by coming back in the spring and lasted well into the heat of summer, probably was still blooming into August. Of course, my fave is echinacea. Love, love, love them. I was overjoyed when they had added to their numbers in the spring, and I made a point of dropping their spent seed heads all around the ground so fingers are crossed that they'll pop up everywhere! Plus I managed to find 3 pots of them on the clearance rack in November.

June, of course, was lovely and naturally hot, but nothing seemed to mind as long as the garden was getting its daily morning misting. I was really surprised that even late in the afternoon it was moist a few inches under the mulch. That made me a very happy gardener! Below is an early hybrid tea, 'Madame Abel Chatenay', bred sometime before 1895.

The double Hollyhocks - one pink and one rose - that I started from seeds last winter were an absolute surprise - not just to me but to my friend who could not believe they were still blooming in July. They are my kind of frilly flower, and they looked striking, standing tall in the middle of the bed. I tried to start some more seeds this fall, but every single one of them failed to survive after sprouting. I'll try again in January. By the way one of the two plants is still green and not bothered at all by temps in the 20's. Amazing.

My shade garden in the back was another part of the garden that made my heart sing this year. 'Limelight' Hydrangea paniculata got nice and big with the addition of daily water in this normally dry bed beneath the oak trees. I even had a flower or two on the variegated lacecap hydrangea. That was a first in four years. I desperately wanted to plant azaleas in this bed when I first started my gardens, but my soil has a lot of limestone in it, and this bed was over 7.0 pH. So after several failures I dug it all out in sections, piling the soil on a tarp outside the bed, and lining the bottom with black plastic garbage bags, my theory being the plastic would hold water and prevent the native soil from migrating up into the new soil. It has seemed to work in that one azalea is thriving, but one died. We had a very wet spring this year, and I think the plastic was holding too much water. I stabbed holes down into the plastic in an attempt to save the azalea but to no avail. I replaced it with Plectranthus 'Mona Lavender'. There are several in the bed now along with begonias, ginger and an 'Endless Summer' hydrangea. I need more of those 'Endless Summer' bushes!

Another favorite (my, aren't they all!!) is this tea named 'Souvenir de Francois Gaulain from 1889. His silvery magenta flowers are rare for tea roses, most of them being of the pastel persuasion. Here he is a little over a year old and just full of buds in hot September. He seems to be a type of tea that grows slowly low and wide before it gets taller, and he has beautiful, healthy foliage!

The pale yellow rose above is a 'found' tea rose, 'Bermuda's Anna Olivier' shown as she looked on July 29th. Do you see any blackspot or are all those flowers just hiding it all? A very effective camouflage, wouldn't you say? 'BAO' absolutely loves the heat, so much so that she was a late starter to get going in spring. She is a fabulous shrub in my garden.

This rose is 'Le Vesuve', a China-Tea, and don't tell 'Louis Philippe', but this rose may be my other favorite due to its non-stop blooming and wonderful pink/red, flouncy flowers. I'm a sucker for pink/red! I could easily wax poetic about this rose for pages and pages - and will probably do so pretty soon.

This winter of 2010 brought me a greenhouse - a 5x6 pop-up greenhouse to be exact. Today I was watering the plants in it, and AAACK! A black snake was in there. I know they're friends, but truly they give me the willies!!!

Yes, 2010 was a grand year for this gardener. Not to say everything is just the way I want it. No doubt, that will never happen! But I definitely got smarter, more savvy about what gardening is all about, less apt to make rash decisions and yet quicker to see when a plant is not working in the garden scene. Some have called me ruthless, but the fact is I'm not getting any younger, and my garden should be just that -- my garden.

P.S. Here's the list of roses that left us in 2010 (but some live elsewhere):

Blumenschmidt

Carnation

Chrysler Imperial

Cramoisi Superieur

Don Juan (all but the stump)

Fortune's Double Yellow

Gartendirektor Otto Linne

Jean Bach Sisley

Kronprincessin Viktoria

Climbing Madame Caroline Testout

Climbing White Maman Cochet

Marie Nabonnand (all but the stump)

Marjory Palmer

Monsieur Tillier

Mrs Dudley Cross

Perle d'Or

Purrezza

R Roxburghii plena 'The Chestnut Rose'

Rosette Delizy

The Fairy

Tiffany

Happy New Year, everybody!!