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.

Days of future past

As a gardener, I’m in limbo, because my garden is in limbo.

'Souvenir de la Malmaison' on January 3, 2012

  

I haven’t posted (huge apologies for seeming to abandon my blogging efforts) because the past has been strongly present in my garden. No blooms, roses needing rejuvenation badly, the time for pruning being agonizingly far away, crispy being far more prevalent than green, this in-between time seemed to slip this gardener out of Drive and into Neutral. Breadmaking and dear husband took my attention, and the garden couldn’t have been farther away.

However, the last two weekends I was gardening. Thirty-eight daylilies are now in the ground. Hardscaping in the form of cement block edging in the back garden is in place. A plan to revitalize ‘Mme Abel Chatenay’ and ‘Bermuda’s Anna Olivier’ in the front garden is solidified. Christmas bonus cash has been spent on manure compost, pine bark mulch, dahlia and astilbe tubers, hollyhock roots, potting soil and patio pots for veggie seeds and Yukon Gold potato starts. Seeds have arrived in the mail.

The past is beginning to fade, and the future is definitely within reach now. The days are longer now, enabling me to accomplish stuff after work. Temperatures again are Floridian in nature. The roses’ lack of foliage allows me to see how they’ll need to be trimmed and pruned. Endless googling has delivered a viable weapon against my enemy, the squirrel. (There will be a post on that.) The discovery of non-pH-adjusted sphagnum peat moss at Walmart has offered new hope for my crappy calcareous garden soil. We even had .35 inch of rain this week. Everything is moving in a positive direction, out of the winter doldrums and into the hustle and bustle of spring. The daunting task of rebuilding the garden has morphed into normal spring garden labor, transforming my outlook in the process.

Since my gardening apparently will always be a learning experience, there will be googling and posting “Help!” questions on the Antique Rose Forum about how to shape up ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ and ‘Blush Noisette’. Progress in that area and others will be halted until I know what to do, but since pruning is a month away, that’s not a problem, merely something else to occupy evening computer time. The balancing act of life continues with laundry, housekeeping, breadmaking, work, and husband who is recovering nicely from his back surgery on December 29th. Two weeks off from work (last year’s final week of vacation saved for the surgery had to be taken even though the surgery hadn’t happened yet and the first week of this year’s vacation taken to do absolutely everything that DH could not do for himself) was not spent in the garden, but that’s okay. The garden will get done. Spring will return. The future is on its way.