All my children

…and can I remember all their names?

'Absolute Treasure'

'Marietta Dreamer'

'Crimson Pirate' - Not positive since I didn't save the name on the Sam's box but pretty sure of the ID

'Elizabeth Ferguson' - very large flower and tall

'Mary Guthrie'

'Quietness'

'Sherry Lane Carr'

'White Pet'

'White Pet'

I have no clue.

'Byzantine Emperor'

Dahlia 'Lucca Johanna' - Walmart came through beautifully on this one.

'Madame Abel Chatenay'

'Madame Abel Chatenay'

'Chrysler Imperial'

'Chrysler Imperial'

'All American Magic'

Clematis 'Princess Diana' unless I have them mixed up and it's 'Duchess of Albany'.

'Souvenir de la Malmaison'

'Sherry Lane Carr'

'Anda'

Salvia farinacea

'White Pet' - one huge cluster

''Faces Of A Clown' - first flowers often aren't perfect, missing a sepal.

'Lucca Johanna'

'Madame Abel Chatenay' - Her fading flowers remind me of a Victorian lady's flouncy dressing gown. What else would an 1894 rose look like?

'Madame Abel Chatenay'

Coreopsis

'Hermosa'

Echinacea aka Purple Coneflower

'Souvenir de la Malmaison'

'Quietness'

'Caribbean Perfection Plus' described as canary yellow. Glow-in-the-dark yellow is more like it. More glowing than this photo.

The rose fairy came today. A baby 'Rosette Delizy' was delivered in person by the lovely Cydney Wade of Rose Petals Nursery. I'm very excited to have the beautiful 'Rosette Delizy' back in my garden. She'll go into a 2-gallon pot and be planted next spring. Many, many cuttings of 'Mme Abel Chatenay' and 'Capitaine Dyel de Graville' were taken back to the nursery. Wait for them.

'Gruss an Teplitz' in a 3-gallon pot also arrived today with 3 buds. Can't wait to see and smell them.

I'll break the bad news first. 'Bermuda's Anna Olivier' didn't make it. She probably would have though had it not been for the murderous squirrels. Unbelievably, the day after my post about her all of the tiny new upper growth was gone, and the three basal breaks were chewed off. As more new canes sprouted, they were chewed off to nothing. I finally gave up hope and pulled her out. I could not bear to see her tortured. She had a handful of short roots and without the squirrels perhaps she could have made it. The good news is that this little baby is 'Bermuda's Anna Olivier'. She'll also be potted on to a 2-gallon pot for planting next spring. In the meantime Salvia farinacea fills the void.

Clematis 'Venosa Violacea', a viticella

The back garden just before dusk.

'Absolute Treasure' in the evening light looking unlike herself in the first photo above but still beautiful.

Gone to a good home

Today was the day that six roses left their old home in my garden and went to a new home at Rose Petals Nursery. Cydney Wade, owner of RPN and sweet friend, graciously did the digging but may not be doing much more digging since that shovel was still there in the dirt after she left. Cyd is holding ‘Le Vesuve’. No, not the big one in the front garden. This one was in the back garden where it was getting so little sun that its blooms were almost white and even some of its buds which are normally red were white. That made the decision easier. A rose is entitled to live in conditions where it can be true to itself.



You can’t see into the trailer, but it’s full, and the roses are all lined up to get on board. Cyd took all of my ‘Giant Apostle’s Irises’, one of the ‘Red Cascade’ climbers that lived on the white picket fence next to ‘Bermuda’s Anna Olivier’ in the front garden, ‘Pink Perpetue’, a climber that was living a lie as a bush in my front garden, ‘Parade’, another climber that would be so happy lolling on a fence with blooms all along her canes but never had such a position here, and  ‘La Sylphide’, a smallish Tea rose that I wasn’t real keen on parting with, but some things are just for the best. Smallish Tea roses are hard to come by.



The last one in the trailer was ‘Polonaise’. I still have one here recently moved from the big patio pot to the ground in the back garden. A small garden does not have the luxury of keeping duplicates – at least not many of them.



Don’t you love Cyd’s signage on her trailer and SUV. If you see her on I-75, wave to her. She may be carrying precious rose cargo.



How appropriate that my ‘Polonaise’ was blooming today. It never missed a beat after coming out of the pot. So all’s well that ends well, and now I can get to the work of moving old roses and planting new ones.

Cyd emailed that she and the plants arrived home safely but after dark, so tonight the roses are resting overnight in water in a horse water trough, a wheel barrow and a galvanized tub. Tomorrow she'll tuck their toesies into good Florida soil.

Special visitors

 

Let's play "What's My line". These two delightful ladies have many things in common but mostly one thing in common. The many things are 200+ roses, and the one thing is the nursery that is comprised of those roses. You might ask Linda Rengarts on the left if she owns a rose nursery. She would answer, no, I do not. You might ask Cydney Wade on the right, "Did you start your own rose nursery from scratch?" And she would say, no, I did not.

Not to be too cute, I'll just cut to the chase. Linda is the one who started her own rose nursery from scratch, and Cyd is the one who now owns the rose nursery. She bought Linda's nursery last December. Linda and Cyd are the former and present proprietors of my famous favorite rose nursery, Rose Petals Nursery currently in Newberry, Florida.

Cyd and Linda wanted to see my garden in person, and I wanted them to take some cuttings from several of my roses, so they rode about an hour south on I-75 from Gainesville to Ocala this hot Sunday afternoon. Cuttings are important to small own-root rose nurseries. They are the seeds of next season's product line. Usually, cuttings are taken from their own bushes, but if there's a rose that they don't have, they have to buy the plant just like the rest of us and wait for it to become mature enough to tolerate cutting off several inches of cane. Or someone like me who grows the wanted rose can donate cuttings that will provide stock and a mother plant for the nursery. Most importantly, this donation puts a rose in commerce for other rosarians to grow and enjoy. The more people who grow a rose the less likely it is to disappear forever. Linda and Cyd turned their love of roses into a business that will perpetuate Old Garden Roses for decades and perhaps even generations.

It is a very exciting thing to me to be a part of perpetuating these roses beyond the reach of my small garden. So it was an easy thing to live for an extra week with crispy deadheads all over my roses. Deadheads that would have gone to the county compost pile or been dropped under the roses will make new plants that one day, hopefully, some of you will plant in your garden. To me that is very cool!

Plus I feel like I have a vested interest in seeing that Cyd's efforts are successful and her nursery lives long and prospers. With shipping costs as they are a Florida own-root OGR nursery is like money in the bank for Florida gardeners, and the quality of her rose plants is second to none. The truth is that I want all small nurseries to live long and prosper, and hopefully, gardeners all across the country will be their frequent customers. However, having a Florida nursery that raises - and proves - roses in Florida's conditions gives Florida gardeners that extra ounce of assurance that a rose will prosper in their garden. That's a good thing, as is keeping Florida dollars in the hands of Floridians during these tough economic times. Gardeners in every state should feel the same way.

Cyd is in the process of relocating the nursery - bush by bush - seven miles down the road to the 100-acre ranch that she happily shares with her husband, Art, and lots of antique horses, antique cattle and untold numbers of chickens that lay delicious eggs. I'm sure she is excitedly busy designing the layout of the new gardens and collecting ideas of all sorts for the parts and pieces that go into making a garden beautiful and customer friendly. She's a sweetheart and dedicated to the task before her. Not least of all is the support and encouragement that Linda gives freely to Cyd even going so far as digging two roses out of my garden that will find a new home in Cyd's garden. They're great ladies who make a great team. I'm so blessed to count them both as friends.

Managing rose inventory

There for a long time roses were coming in and going out at almost the same rate - or so it seemed. The end of 2009 saw some "ruthless" cleaning out, because I wanted to reduce my numbers, but spring of 2010 saw a good many newcomers. It was with a disappointed heavy sigh that I read the tabulation of ins and outs after last spring. It was a wash. I hadn't reduced my inventory at all. I so much wanted to get under 90 for the sake of my sanity. Ninety-six is way to close to 100 and lends credence to the idea that I have no self-control. Don't you think 89 has a much more reasonable ring to it? To my credit, I did have the total down to 87, but then it went up again.

Last fall the outgoings were flying out of here. I simply decided that in order to live here a rose had to meet some minimum pleasure requirements - for me. Primary on the list of requirements was canes with leaves, then canes that didn't turn black, then flowers that didn't ball all the time, then leaves that didn't blackspot all the time, then leaves that didn't cry out "I need iron" all the time, and finally plants that wouldn't at any moment engulf my entire property and dwelling. Apparently, not growing veggie centers wasn't a requirement, because I kept one that did that so there must have been another requirement that caused one exit. In both evacuations I found homes for several roses that left, but some moved on to the happy compost pile in the sky since I didn't feel it would be nice to pass them on to an unsuspecting friend.  (I've gotten quite adept at cutting them into little pieces.) Then in September and November there were more incoming. There were some Buck roses I wanted to try, and the coming closure of my favorite nursery (though admittedly temporary) pushed me to get more, totaling about eight or ten or twelve more (no need to be specific). Sigh. Back again to that magic number 96.

That brings me to yesterday. I went out to plant some more seedlings which I did do, but I made a command decision to move some roses as well and quite efficiently. Archduke Charles went into the ground from his 20-gallon pot, the last of my 'permanent container roses' experiment. He went into half of the space left by house-eater 'Cl White Maman Cochet' about whose ultimate size I was perfectly clear to her new owner. In a desperate attempt to save my investment in the Hybrid Musk 'Jeri Jennings' (shipping from California for a single rose more than doubles the price) she has a new home on the east side next to the fence kind of under 'Reve d'Or'. I'm hoping that this will be a cooler situation for her and she'll hold on to her leaves more tightly. And tiny little 'Souv de Pierre Notting' was moved out of the shade of 'E. Veyrat Hermanos' into JJ's former sunny spot. That left me with four roses in my pot ghetto: 'White Maman Cochet' (destined for a new front bed), 'Marchesa Bocella' (heading for a pot home), 'Mme Scipion Cochet' the Hybrid Perpetual (planned for a switch with a non-descript tea that does nothing for me and that's saying a lot because I love teas) and Martha Gonzalez who will be staying in a pot, I think. Quite unbelievably, all this juggling left one vacancy in the garden.

So, as circumstances often do, today they conspired to fill that vacancy. Just on a lark, I went up to the Rose Petals Nursery website where previously all roses were designated, "Item cannot be ordered." Imagine my glee upon seeing the words, "Available from stock." Well, right off the bat I knew there were two roses I really wanted (uh-huh, I can see you doing the math in your little heads), 'Lilian Austin' and 'Souv de St. Anne's'. I had seen them in November when visiting a friend's garden, and they stole my heart. Now, as to the math, Lilian will go in the vacancy, and SdSA will go in the spot of one of my three 'Hermosa' bushes who will go in a pot, a lovely one, I'm sure. Well, as long as I was there, I figured I'd look at the Polyanthas. After all, they're small. (And don't argue.) And this is where the conspiracy enters the picture. Someone put a climbing polyantha in with the bushes. So obviously this was meant to be. There before my eyes was 'Climbing Clotilde Soupert', proclaiming her availability. Someone knew that I'm a sucker for this rose since I have two bush forms, and she performs wonderfully for me. Someone also knew that Parade has been living here on borrowed time, saved by her flowers that I love but doomed by her, shall we say, foliage. Ah-ha, 'Clotilde Soupert' would be the perfect climber for the prime front porch location of 'Parade', and 'Parade' could go somewhere in the back, somewhere I'm not sure where, but later on that.

I'm counting and counting again. Dang, 97! It's a conspiracy, that's all. One thing's for sure though. I'll never have more than 100, because that's all the markers I have.