Some glamour shots

The thing about glamour shots is that they are tight, zoomed-in shots that mostly exclude. I suppose every gardener dreams of whole garden glamour shots. Someday – maybe this spring, I hope – mine will be wide, all-inclusive ones. The very thought of it makes my heart skip. However, now in the dead of winter I only have small spots of glamour scattered around the garden. I always fear that tight shots give a false impression of my garden, and that if someone actually strolled through it after seeing a post like this, they’d think I had lied and wonder where all those beautiful roses are. Well, they’re there – a couple on this bush, one on that bush, mostly few and far between, but their scarcity only makes them more precious and makes me all the more impressed with a rose that can produce such beauty when all around it others are sleeping.

'Maggie' is coming into her own a year after being planted as a tiny rooted cutting. The cane that holds this bouquet is about 3-1/2 feet tall and vertical. Her flowers have no white or light pink in them. Unfortunately, the coloring in this photo is a figment of my camera's imagination, and I can't correct it, but this is her first such bloom cluster and I simply must post it. She is fastastically fragrant, too. Can't wait to see her growth this year.

The femme fatale of my garden is, of course, 'Souvenir de la Malmaison' .

SDLM cycles quickly from flush to flush, and I wouldn't be without her even if her ugly stage does at times tempt me to reduce her numbers from three to two or maybe even one. The ugly stage only lasts a matter of days, so I buck up and wait for the beauty to reappear almost magically.

When she re-clothes herself with deep green foliage and her big, round buds appear everywhere, I say to myself, "See! What were you thinking?"

'Le Vesuve' is definitely struggling with her health, and unfortunately, this gardener hasn't much of a clue as to why, but she has two blooms on her now. Somehow I managed to get the setting sun behind me in this photo. I can't figure out where the reflection is coming from.

Here's 'Maggie' again. Her color is a deeper crimson than in this photo..

Not a great pic of 'Clotilde Soupert', the bush. These all-white blooms are more summer-like and a little puzzling. Since her foliage is a bit yellowish perhaps she's showing her need for food. She's trying to flush with our recent warm weather, and I just don't think she's got enough energy to pull it off. Soon I'll be pruning her and the January feeding will be kicking in and she'll be off to the races. Of course, I could be totally wrong in my analysis - just guessing.

Now here's 'Clotilde Soupert, Climbing' showing us more typical cool-weather blooms.

Another cluster of Climbing CS. So fragrant as well as beautiful.

'Hermosa' is a great small bush, only reaching about 3-1/2 feet tall and a couple of feet wide in my garden. I have three of them planted together. In the spring they are continuously covered with pepto pink flowers and are quite breathtaking. They have a peppery sweet fragrance courtesy of their China heritage.

'Madame Abel Chatenay' surprisingly has a single bloom on her nearly naked body and one bud. I thought I would be pruning bare canes, but she is leafing out a little. You can see why she's my Belle of the Ball.

I had to snap this pic of the first bud of  'Belinda's Dream'. Fuzzy focus in the waning light but exciting nonetheless.

Talk about exciting!! 'Rosette Delizy' is giving me palpatations. Planted last November, I think, she is really filling out and has lots of flower buds on the tips of her new canes. She's between Maggie and Madame Lombard, so I think her yellow/carmine pink combination will be lovely in this part of the front garden especially with yellow daylily 'Sherry Lane Carr' very nearby.

Here's a tall shot of the lower part of  'Clotilde Soupert, Climbing'. I like the way she blooms in the middle of herself and not just at the ends. She's only a couple of years old, so her blooming will only get better. I wonder what her spring flush will look like.

Granted it's not really black spot season, but I am so pleased with 'Hot Cocoa'. Being a grafted rose and an older plant than my typical own-root bands is making for some unexpected instant gratification. She's shooting up a nice, strong cane already.

The lovely 'Mrs B R Cant' is actually a deeper raspberry than she appears here.

'Bolero 2004' is one of my new $7 grafted modern roses that I got at Lowe's. Several flower buds offer more instant gratification if they survive the rest of our winter.

This rose may or may not be a mistake on the gardener's part. First of all, she is a bareroot grafted rose ($5.98 at Home Depot) that had already broken dormancy and was sprouting new canes which I thought was a good thing. Upon further education on the subject, I learned it may not be "productive growth", but I'm not sure what that means exactly. I bought this 'Perfume Delight' fragrant Hybrid Tea in my recent mini buying-binge of cheap fragrant modern roses, and I think 'Pink Peace' might have been a better choice, disease-wise. But I didn't want to just throw her away, so off we go on our adventure together. She's in a pot because there's no more ground available.

So I'm just going to sit back and watch what happens. Basically, "new growth" is always a good thing - in the plant and in the gardener who is spreading her wings beyond OGRs at least a for a little while. Feels like a Star Trek episode - boldly going where no man has gone before.

This is 'Heirloom', a bareroot from Aldi that to this novice seems to be a better quality plant than the Home Depot rose with more canes, less wax and no growth at time of purchase. It was inside in air conditioning whereas Home Depot's were outside under shade cloth. This new modern bed is the former fish pond. Two whites (Bolero 2004 and Pope John Paul II) and the deep lavender Heirloom will be pretty together with daylilies and a purply 'Le Baron' dahlia.

The winter shadow cast by the house is slowly moving closer to the house. Eventually, it will move several feet to the left of this photo with only two or three feet of shadow remaining and a sun-drenched patio. The cool shade is nice, but the spring sun's arrival will be most welcome.

I so enjoy this side of the back garden, but it seems it is forever in transition. There are three new roses in the bed along the fence - 'Vanity', 'The Charlatan' and 'Moondance', and poor 'Alexander Hill Gray' took a near-death spiral after I moved him a few feet last November. He's finally coming around. 'Duchesse de'Auerstadt' is on the arbor on the left with clematis 'Venosa Violacea' and 'General Gallieni' is at the far right. 'Pat Austin' still resides in the clay pot, not doing much but noticeably more vertical recently. Photos always look like an indistinct jumble, but here it is anyway.

My blogging seems to have shifted to midday. Seems like I should be outside in the garden not inside on the computer, so that’s where I’m headed now. It’s time to get out the 8-foot ladder and the long grabber, because the climbers all need to be tied up again. Oh, joy! One of my least favorite tasks that I always procrastinate on and that always seems to come un-done and need to be redone - sort of like cleaning the toilet and about as enjoyable. That's no way to end a blog post, is it? Okay, attitude adjustment coming. Gardening isn't all pretty flowers and peaceful strolling. There is also strenuous work involved which I accept easily on the ground, but eight feet in the air is another animal altogether. Suck it up, woman, and get to it. When it's done, you'll love it!!

January feeding

Our rose society’s award-winning newsletter, Rose Rambler, offers great articles and practical information every month from September through May, a definite perk that comes with membership. One of the most useful pages is the monthly check list. It’s a neat reminder of what should be done in the garden in the next month. All I can say is that’s it’s a good thing I retired because I have never had time to read them in time for them to be useful – until this month! I did not know that “many rosarians recommend applying organics in January so they can be broken down by microbes and become available to the plant in early spring.” (Don’t forget, since spring comes earlier here, this timing is specific to Florida.) So I’ve been doing it wrong or at least not optimally because in previous years I have applied my organics around the end of February or early March when I was spreading horse manure compost and mulch. Last year I did manage to read one item on the check list. “Apply 1/2 cup of Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) per medium bush 30 days prior to pruning.” So this year I was prepared to get an early start.

Since feeding time is upon me, last Thursday I took a rather long ride to Newberry to Growers Fertilizer Corp., because they sell their own sewage sludge for $6.13 for 40 pounds. That’s called half price compared to Milorganite!! That made the trip worthwhile, and I bought 10 bags which hopefully should last a few years. I also got 50 pounds of Epsom salts which I applied on Friday. This year I don’t have access to my usual Purely Organic Rose Food, since I finally ran out of my stash, and I figured what was available at Lowe’s, Rose-Tone, would be more expensive than I wanted, but the only organics that Growers had was cottonseed meal (50 lb for $30). This made me decide to make my own “complete food”. I bought the cottonseed meal and went online to find a recipe. Here it is.

Use equal parts of:

Alfalfa Meal – NPK 2-1-2
Fish Meal - NPK 10-6-2
Cottonseed Meal – NPK 6-.4-1.5
Blood Meal – NPK 12-0-0
Bone Meal – NPK 3-15-0
Sludge – NPK 5-3-0




Naturally, there were problems with this recipe. First, I couldn’t find alfalfa meal, only the usual pellets, and I opted to wait until after pruning to apply them. Soybean meal is an option, too, but I couldn't find that either. Also, couldn’t find fish meal, but I did find a smallish bag of Kelp Meal at Seminole Feed. It’s a good source of trace minerals, and roses love seaweed. I also opted to not include the blood meal and sludge at this time because they are immediately available to the plants, and I don’t want them growing yet – anymore than they already are anyway. The weatherman says we’ll have 32 degrees tomorrow night, and certainly more freezes and harder freezes are coming. I also added sulfur and greensand to the mix. Sulfur not only lowers pH, but it also Greensand is slow-acting potassium, and I was ecstatic to find it at Seminole.

So in a 5-gallon bucket I added 4 cups each of the red items and 1/2 cup each of the kelp meal and sulfur (which was a total guess on my part) and mixed them thoroughly. (I'll probably put the rest of the kelp meal in the fish hydrolysate that I'm going to make that I learned about in another Rose Rambler article this month. No more bottled fish emulsion!) I repeated this three more times to fill the bucket as full as I could carry it. It turned out I used four buckets (plus a little) to feed all the roses, daylilies and about two-thirds of the azaleas. I still have more left of all the ingredients. Since the Purely Organic used to cost $25 for a 50-lb bag and I needed 2 bags, I probably didn’t save much if any money doing it this way, but I had no choice and I’m happy.

50 Pounds of Epsom salts and 400 pounds of sewage sludge - oh, goodie!

It’s not as critical to scratch organics into the soil as it is for chemicals because the microbes manage to find them as long as they’re touching soil, but it is advisable to water everything afterwards. Since my back hates scratching it in anyway, I kill two birds with one stone with a hard stream of water from the hose. I just have to be careful not to obliterate any delicate plants in the process with my bad aim. I did good today – everything got mixed, applied and watered in and no plants were blasted apart...and DH took me out for Chinese!

As I moved along, I dug up a few Purple Coneflowers that were invading the space of some roses. (I told you they’re thugs, didn’t I? Beautiful, but they don’t play nice in this small garden especially when planted by the dozen.) Then I noticed that one of my two ‘Fred Ham’ daylilies had gotten huge and was too big for its space. How convenient that I had just taken out a coneflower on the other side of ‘Madame Abel Chatenay’ from ‘Fred Ham’. So I split off two big fans from Fred and planted them in the newly vacant spot on the other side of MAC. I’m so pleased that I’ll have twice as many of these large, gorgeous daylily blooms this year.


By way of follow-up I think I told you that I had bought a bareroot rose, ‘Heirloom’, at Aldi the other day after I had bought a grafted ‘Hot Cocoa’ at Lowe’s. Well, the modern-rose bug has given me an awful bite, and I’ve been scratching the itch. I checked both Aldi stores for more bareroots, but they were sold out. The other Lowe’s had no roses, so I hit my Lowe’s again on Sunday. I found two with labels, ‘New Zealand’ and ‘Moondance’. Referring to Helpmefind.com on my trusty smartphone in the garden center, I discovered that both of these roses are described as “very disease resistant”. Now, one location’s very disease resistant rose may be another location’s black spot magnet, but what the heck, there aren’t that many very disease resistant modern roses out there, so I grabbed them. (Remember…I don’t spray fungicide.) For $7 each I got two beautiful, fragrant roses, albeit a bit bedraggled. I guess it’s true…if you buy them, space will appear, because I am finding places for them in the garden, either in the ground or in pots. On Sunday at the rose society meeting Annie said for $6 each she got Oklahoma, Mr. Lincoln and another fantastic hybrid tea rose (darn! what was the name?) at the Home Depot in…oh, gee, was it Crystal River? Well, wherever it was, keep your eyes peeled, folks. Roses are out their for the taking. With a little TLC they’ll make wonderful additions to your gardens. I know I’ll be out there looking. No self-control!!

No more pond

Is anyone else good at tangents? ...those things that take you off the what-should-be path and send you down the what-shouldn’t-be path? My brain is so capable of being switched-on to something with all the intensity of a nuclear blast. Have you ever tried to put a mushroom cloud back in the bottle? Blessedly, I only had to live with this tangent for two months instead of years and years.

You see, maintenance isn’t my strong suit. You knew that, right? Around Christmas the pond went from clear on Sunday to tea-colored on Monday and then black on Tuesday. I could only see the fish if they were a few inches from the surface. Miss Clueless was dumbfounded. That’s the thing about tangents. There’s never a knowledge prerequisite.

So Saturday I was going to fill it in, but then the goldfish were so cute so I tried to save the day. DH suggested the Shop-Vac to suck out the leaves. Then we put some one-inch foam and some quilt-batting in the tank to filter the water, but the vacuum only worked until the tank got full, so it was an on/off, on/off proposition that would likely take the rest of my life. Then I asked DH if the pump could be used to filter somehow. I know you know the answer to that question, but I have zero mechanical abilities. So I hooked up the pump appropriately. (No joking – I had to have him explain it three times. “Hook it up” just was not sufficient.)

The batting was getting blacker and blacker, and by 2AM the fish were visible just below the ledge. I was excited and decided what I needed was a Bio-filter for $62 and the required vinyl tubing for $15 – $20 and a vacuum for $25 if I could find one with more than three stars that half the reviewers on Amazon didn’t hate, but I wasn’t settled on all of that so I didn’t pull the trigger. I did find two books that looked to be the perfect solution to my ignorance of fish and ponds, and I ordered them.

Sunday morning I dashed out to see the clear water and the bottom of the pond. That didn’t happen. Visibility was still terrible even after filtering for 18 hours. I was dejected. I couldn’t get past the thought of killing the fish, so there was no decision on Sunday and no decision on Monday, but Tuesday was different. Different day, different tangent. I made the decision to go buy the bulk potting soil and fill ‘er up. Before I left I turned on the pump, and when I got back an hour later it was almost dry.

It's going to be my Hybrid Tea bed, my cutting bed. Well, la-de-da! Never had one of those before.

I was at Aldi today. They had body-bags (bare-root roses so named because they're stuffed in plastic, and they're kind of a no-no especially in Florida and prone to failure because their root systems are chopped short) for $4.97, so I got 'Heirloom' which I had been eyeing online, and it's soaking in water now. Possibly another tangent but I prefer experiment. Apparently, it gets bigger than I thought and may get some BS, so I'm going to plant it over by the post where the purple clematis is growing. Borrowed leaves are still leaves. I have hopes for the cuttings I got from the bouquets at the Festival of Roses. One is growing new shoots like crazy, and 'Sweet Juliet', 'Bride's Dream', and a couple others are doing well. They won't all fit, but I hope at least three will, and I have pots ready for the ones that don't fit.

Black dirt is indeed possible in Florida. You just have to truck it in. I threw on a bunch of Milorganite so the worms would hurry over, and then when I was cleaning up, I noticed two bags of Black Hen (chicken manure) that had been hanging around so long the plastic bags were disintegrating. So I threw them on. Well, not exactly. The former granules were now congealed into actual wet poo of a very solid consistency and stink-ee! Oh, my goodness! It was like tar, very hard to break up. If this turns out to be a very successful bed, I'll be using this stuff a lot.

Now on to the pretty faces of 'Clotilde Soupert, Climbing'. These blooms were quite large, almost 3 inches across.

Considering these were buds when we had a recent freeze, I'm amazed they're so gorgeous.

And they're fragrant, too.

When my work was done today (it only took four hours), I had the feeling I was back in my comfort zone, the place where I have the most control over what goes on. I’m comfortable with dirt. I know dirt. Dirt is good.