Never received an award before!

Thank you, Masha!

for thinking my blog deserves an award.

 

Now then, I hope I have the instructions right about what I am supposed to do next.

1. Post a link back to the person who gave you the award (see above).
2. Tell 7 things about myself.

       1. In high school I worked as a telephone operator back when calls were answered by plugging the "front cord" into a hole in the board above the blinking light of the caller and then plugging the "back cord" into a jack that went to the called number. I thought it was a fun job, being the anonymous "Operator 115".

       2. My hometown of Norwalk, CT is right next door to Westport, CT, home of some very famous people. The most exciting call I ever handled was a person-to-person call to Sammy Davis, Jr. This was the coolest call I'd ever handled even though Sammy was not there. I asked the caller if he wanted to leave a message. He said, "Yes, tell him Paul Newman called." Instantly, all breath left my body and no sound would come out of my mouth. Paul kept saying, "Operator, Operator." I think I was finally able to grunt or something.

       3. When going through sorority "rush" at the University of Alabama, the counselor advised all the girls to "tell them something that will make them remember you". Even though I was an extremely shy, introverted girl, I did have my Paul Newman story, and I told it at every sorority house I went to that day. It worked.

       4. I always wanted a yellow Volkswagon beetle.

       5. I've been married 33+ years and have 3 stepsons, 3 DILs, and 7 grandchildren.

       6. Quilting and sewing were my things before roses.

       7. I love to buy books. Unfortunately, I don't have time to read them all.

3. Award from 5 to 15 other new bloggers.

I enjoy these 'newish' blogs immensely. I hope you will, too. 

        Christina's Organic Garden Dreams
        Sandra's Roses, Color and Light
        The Professor's Garden Musings
 And thank you again, Masha.       

A day late

Sorry not to have kept my promise to give you "more tomorrow". But "tomorrow" was an extra long day at work, and this pruner was pooped so no pruning was done yesterday. I managed to get the last cuts made on Le Vesuve as it was getting dark (which thankfully came at 6:45 tonight and later tomorrow night!). I hope in the daylight he won't be lopsided. So no photos for you. I was all set to take pictures last evening of the unfinished side and the finished side, but I had no charged batteries. Sometimes life just doesn't cooperate.

I will tell you that this rose is a cantankerous one. Tonight's half had even more oddities on it, places where I had trimmed in the past that had sprouted umbrella growth. Definitely not intuitive pruning. It got dark before I could get way in to the middle, too. Hopefully, I'll remember to get back to it.

As you can see I have eight minis and polys in larger pots around my front circle. On Sunday I pruned them from a stool (much easier on the back), feeling like a bonsai gardener. I would sit down in front of each rose and say to myself, "What the heck!!!" Zillions of not-much-bigger-than-toothpick-sized canes. Where to begin but at the beginning, i.e., start cutting. Which is what I did, and it felt like I was moving at a good clip, but at the end of each day it was my judgment that I had made little progress on what I had thought would be a one day job. I may not have mentioned it on this blog before, but I have a tendency to be slow, stemming from my tendency to be perfectionistic, I guess. That must be the reason it took three days to trim the freezes off eight liriope (also known as buzz cuts), prune and/or de-leaf eleven roses in the ground and eight roses in pots and cut back the dead tops off several perennials.

And now on to the backyard. One-week vacation starts tomorrow at 4:15pm. Yay!!! Compost coming Saturday morning. Yay!! Dreaming of the spring flush and remembering last year's, Le Vesuve says Hi!

Been pruning for days

Let's see. What other activities are approached with such trepidation? Taking a swimming lesson? Driver's test? Job interview? Meeting his/her parents? Wedding night? Yes, yes, I know those are all life changing, life-or-death events, so what's the big deal about pruning? Perhaps it's the do-it-yourself aspect of it. Ever given yourself a perm? Oh, my, I have. Total disaster. Perhaps it's because I've never seen it done, never seen the finished work, never had it explained, never understood the whys and wherefores of it. Perhaps it's the dread of not knowing where to start...or when to stop. Or maybe the terror of living forever with this bald plant in the center of my front yard and being branded the laughing stock of the gardening world and the neighborhood.

Whatever it is, it is something that must be overcome. Mind over matter. Just dive in. Sink or swim. What helped me was a series of how-to photos in Cass Bernstein's "A Tea Pruning Lesson" (the link is in the sidebar). I remember her talking about forks, and the photos of the bushes after pruning were full of forked canes.

So when I went out today to continue and maybe finish pruning Le Vesuve (a mass of dense, crossing, hyper thorny canes), it was with the picture of a fork in the forefront of my mind. This rose delights in growing multiple canes from one budeye (apparently, a tea trait), some at 90 degree angles straight up, some running tightly parallel, some bending again at an odd angle. This word, fork, was a lifesaver even though many times there were multiple choices of forks to pick. I just kind of figured which one would look the most normal, but sometimes the answer was none. That's when I punted, thinking that Cass would understand. It became very clear early on that this rose does not play by the rules. It's not unusual to see canes growing backwards toward  the inside of the bush from a cane growing normally toward the outside of the bush. In those situations I made a command decision and cut it off. Seems like I remember that anything growing in or down or crossing on trees should be removed, so I applied that rule to roses. There were many command decisions to be made. All those skinny, zig-ziggy canes near the bottom. All that new growth. How much is too much and not enough. Pruning must be done with the brain in gear - or not. I have been known to over-think things.

Removing all the leaves from this very well foliated bush was a great help. Suddenly I could see the canes that had been invisible. Wearing rose gauntlets gave me real fearlessness after the first time I reached my arm deep into the bush and came out unscathed. I was no longer afraid. By the time it was too dark to see this evening, I was about halfway around this six-foot diameter monster, just trimming out the crazy stuff. Tomorrow after that's finished, I may still have to shorten it up some and draw it farther in from the edges. No nibbling on this fast growing two-year-old baby. Using the brick edging as a guide has been helpful. When I stood back in the dimness, I had hope that Le Vesuve would not only be smaller and thinner but also symmetrical for the first time in its life. Yes, I had hope, and the fear was gone. This was not the dangerous ogre of my nightmares. Just a jolly green giant wanting to be tamed. Boundaries are good for a lot of things, and I think come the spring flush I'm going to see how much this rose loves discipline. More tomorrow.

'Parade' on the move

 

This is 'Parade' last year. My plan was to replace him with Climbing Clotilde Soupert and send him far away to the landfill.  Well, I think he's gotten wind of the shovel, because he is sprouting absolutely everywhere. So I thought about the spot I have on the northeast side of a fence that probably gets too much shade for a bush, but since 'Parade' tolerates some shade and most of him would be above the fence anyway, I thought it would be a perfect fit with the added benefit of the rather remote location making his less-than-well-foliated nature less bothersome.  Last weekend that was a great idea, but this weekend now that he's budding all over the place, I'm concerned about the damage I will do him. Sigh! He's definitely got to be moved, and roses do bounce back amazingly well. I just hope I don't hurt him too bad.  Well, maybe he won't mind the jolt of the move, and perhaps he'll just be relieved that he's got a new home and isn't mulch. He's worth saving, don't you think? And he's not even an antique.

Signs of new life

The sun came out this afternoon after several days of gray and rain. When I stepped out of my car in my driveway after work, everything seemed to sparkle so I went for a walk around. Most of the rose bushes were bare as before. Some had quite a few tiny new leaves, and some only had tiny red swellings, a sign of the growth to come. Winter in a rose garden in an evergreen state like Florida can be a bit unnerving, especially for a relative newbie like me. I have learned to get a grip and not panic, trusting the roses to know what they're doing. Many of these Old Garden Roses have been making the transition from winter to spring for more than a century, so at this point I am at peace with simply watching.

'Souvenir de la Malmaison', a Bourbon and much more tolerant of cold, held on to many of her leaves and now seems well clothed with many new leaves. She's about 4' wide x 3' tall. I will not be doing any pruning on her. Only dead and diseased stuff will be removed.

By contrast 'Bermuda's Anna Olivier', a Tea, by now has lost almost all of last year's leaves and is just beginning to show new growth. I'm sure there are dead canes on her since she is pretty tender. That's all I will remove on her. She is 5' or 6' across and about 4' tall. When she is fully leafed out, you will not be able to see the fence behind her or the ground under her. She has beautiful healthy foliage and large, fat, pale yellow flowers. (The curving horizontal cane on the fence is 'Red Cascade' not Anna.)

 You can see the tiny red nubs on BAO's canes and the new leaves tinged with red, typical for Tea roses. Something else to note is her twigginess, also typical of Teas. The slender canes in this photo are pretty close to actual size, and though the bush has a basically round shape, its structure is built from all these "twigs" that grow at odd angles, becoming thicker with age. She was planted in March, 2009 as a well rooted 2-gallon plant.

'Madame Abel Chatenay' is a Hybrid Tea from 1894 and is basically naked though she is not damaged by the cold we get here. I will cut her back by about one-third to within about a quarter inch of a budeye, but it won't really matter if it faces in or out. She pretty much grows in all directions and doesn't suffer from blackspot so I don't thin out the middle as is done with modern HTs. She responded quite well to pruning like this last year. She's about 3.5' x 4', and if you grow Hybrid Teas in your garden, you know that she looks nothing like a modern HT.

Here is a close-up of her quite prickly, zig-zaggy canes.  You can see the little red swollen spots, some new leaves and a few little brown twigs. The brown, dead stuff will be removed as well. The thicker brown canes in the photo are not dead. They have just become woody with age. Eventually the green twigs will do the same thing.

Here is 'Cornelia', a Hybrid Musk from 1925 that I'm growing in a fountain form, tied to the trellis. This year I'll probably have to tie her from higher on the wall since her long canes extend too far out into the path. A week or so ago she was bare, but she's starting to sprout. I won't be trimming her at all except for dead twigs that she probably has down near the ground. She's about two years old, and some of her canes are probably at least 8 feet long. She blooms in pendulous clusters of small peachy pink flowers with buds of a deep rose color. She's in a good bit of shade (more this time of year) since HMs don't really like our strong sun and high heat. She gets a tolerable amount of blackspot and apparently doesn't mind my neutral soil or this spot is just untypically more acidic. Of the six Hybrid Musks that I have tried two are left. 'Nur Mahal' is the other one. The others couldn't hack the heat and the limestone.

Perhaps you can see a spot in the lower left of this photo where two canes emerge from the same spot on 'Cornelia's cane. This habit should make for a very bushy plant when it matures.

This is 'Softee', a miniature from 1983. Doesn't she look dead?? But not to worry. I was quite pleased with the health of this rose last year and her clusters of yellow flowers were really sweet. I may do a little trimming on her but not much since she's so young. Just some minute nibbling on her ends.

See? She's not dead!

I'm quite excited about 'Bow Bells'. She's my first David Austin rose. (I just brought home another Austin, 'Lilian Austin'.) Since I don't use fungicides to fight blackspot (and Austins tend to get BS), I have been able to resist these gorgeous roses, but it's been most difficult. The two that I have are reputed to be pretty healthy. 'Bow Bells' went in the ground in August and kept all of her leaves with hardly any blackspot. Though she's still small and low to the ground, she has three flower buds, totally exciting!! If we don't get a hard freeze tonight or in the next couple of weeks, I'll get to see what her flowers look like. Don't ask me what the brown spots are. I'm ignorant.

My absolute favorite companion plant is purple coneflower (echinacea). I love the large deep pink, daisy-like flowers with their tall orangey seed cones that the butterflies love to sit on. A wonderful attribute of this perennial is that the seed heads drop seeds if you are not real diligent about deadheading which I have stopped doing altogether. In fact, when the stems dry out, I pluck them and drop them around the garden, ardently hoping that the seeds will take, and I'll have more of these beautiful plants. These are two (maybe three) new seedlings that have popped up near the mother plant.  The two tiny leaves to the right of bottom center are weeds, unfortunately. You can see most of my mulch is pretty thin, thanks in large part to the armadillos that come through the beds like bulldozers. %$#@$%!!

With all this new growth happening, I will be feeding the garden this weekend. It may not be quite warm enough for the organics to be useful yet, but as soon as it is I want the food to be waiting on the table for my hungry roses, daylilies, et al. Composted horse manure will have to wait until the pile dries out. We've had about 8 inches of rain in the last 10 to 14 days. Yippee!!

If you'd like to view photos and complete descriptions of these roses and others, go here.

Adopt a rose

When I was at the rose nursery yesterday, one tea rose after another was calling my name, and I had to reply "no room". It occurs to me now that it was similar to going to an animal shelter and being touched by so many adorable doggies and kitties that need homes and, of course, being unable to adopt them all but wanting desperately for each and every one of them to be safe and secure in a loving place. Granted, I shed no tears yesterday as I drove out of the nursery and am grateful that I am not that easily touched with heartbreak, but it is a truth that many old roses go ungrown, insecure in their future. In particular, Florida seems to be a place with 'little room' for these glorious plants that would thrive and bloom so well if given a chance. We have an environment and a climate that can be rather inhospitable for gardener and flora alike, but perhaps we should look at our gardening from a different perspective and ask ourselves the question, what is the value of preserving and perpetuating an aspect of nature's beauty that has largely been neglected? At one point in our history there was the catch phrase, "a chicken in every pot". Perhaps it's not quite as catchy, but how about "an antique rose in every yard"? They don't even need a garden...just a spot in the yard.

Sometimes I think we focus too much on rootstock and poor soil in the same way that folks say they lack a large fenced yard and don't like litter boxes in the house. Own-root roses are strong and quite tolerant of less than perfect conditions, and a rose has the ability to weedle its way into one's heart just as a furry creature does. Give one a chance. The rewards will be amazing.

Nur Mahal

Maman Cochet

Louis Philippe

Ding dong, the ditch is dug. Er, I mean rose bed.

Bottom line is, it was a witch of a ditch! I have a whopping 102 inches between the driveway and the property line. I had killed the grass last September (sorry, neighbors), meaning to work on it in a timely manner, but this was as timely as I could manage. The bed is only about 12 feet long. No sense in digging out shaded ground unless you're name is Hercules, and mine is definitely not even though my 85-year-old neighbor across the street thinks otherwise. I must admit to feeling pretty good about myself when I quit working last Sunday although I will also admit I hobbled to a very hot shower and was in bed by 6 o'clock. I figured I'd be barely moving on Monday morning, but au contraire, I felt fine and even felt better about being 60. This digging may well have put to bed my feeling of having one foot in the grave!

Back when it was still hot weather, I did some digging and pick-axing in this bed. Oh, what an agony. The ground was dry and rock hard and bearing abundant chunks of limestone, i.e., rocks! I have been spoiled by soft and penetrable Florida sand. Hitting a rock causes a sort of cartoon effect in me like Roadrunner hitting a wall. Very aggravating. I managed to remove one shovel depth in that attempt.

This time I knew it would be a double dig project. Dig out a shovel deep and heave it in the pickup. When that level's done, go back and repeat. I think I got about six running feet done when I figured the truck needed to be emptied. Driving around to the field behind my house, I was a tad concerned about what DH would think with the front end of the truck so far up in the air. Then each and every shovelful that went into the truck had to come out of the truck. Did I say double-dig? Quadruple-dig seems more accurate. (Just a note: I don't just dump it but neatly fill in low spots back there.) Then back to the driveway and digging another couple of rows, but the suspense was killing me. I had to see what was below the surface of the next layer which is my M.O. My particular brand of attention deficit disorder only allows me to continue doing the same behavior for so long at which point I must deviate and do something different.

So as I said, my intention was to dig and flip and break up. Hmm, I hear you asking, what breaking up is needed for sand? That is a great question. The answer is none. This ground, however, was not normal sand. It was more like mortar mix. Awful stuff! Dead stuff. No bugs, no worms, no roots. Yuck! Doing the flip-and-break-up revealed more thick layers of white clay and something that I think is called marl, a hodgepodge of compressed strata of mostly black 'something' mixed with little chunks of white and orange clay. I just couldn't leave all those chunks of clay in the ground, broken up or not, so I had basketball practice with the chunks and the truck. I stink at basketball. Again I was concerned about what DH would think if he heard all those dings on the truck, but I was getting tired and those chunks were heavy. One of them was as big as a football. I walked that one to the truck. From that 7'x8' area I filled up the truck again, and drove my super cool truck with its nose in the air back into the field. Miraculously, I got it empty again. Monday I moved another truckload of the next three linear feet, and today I finished the digging, but the truck sits full in the driveway, nose high in the air, waiting for me to return tomorrow. Whoa, there definitely should have been more fanfare with that statement.

**I finished the digging.**

This is where I must advise you not to do as I do but to find the right way to do it. As I was looking at all this yucky high-pH clay, my brain decided to apply a lot of powdered sulfur to the bottom of the bed, figuring that any roots that went that deep would find some acidity, so that's what I did. And even though they say earthworms will just appear in a garden bed that's been organically prepared (and I've seen it happen), I knew no right thinking earthworm was ever going to put his tootsies in this stuff, so I also decided to apply a whole lot of Milorganite to the bottom along with ground pine bark (soil conditioner) in hopes of this nutritious layer migrating down even deeper, as everything else does in Florida soil. Afterwards I googled 'calcareous clay', and sadly, I read that it neutralizes sulfur, so today I threw on more sulfur. Like I said, you probably shouldn't do this, but it made sense to me.

The next step toward 'White Maman Cochet' and 'Mrs B R Cant' having a permanent and cozy home is for DH to go get some composted horse manure from the sweet lady with a broodmare farm who loads it into our truck and doesn't charge a nickel for it. Yes, sir, she's the sweetest.

P.S. Here's a couple of pics of the new bed. I measured the bed when I was done. It's actually 14 feet long and narrows to 5 feet at the curb. I'm thinking I'll put White MC toward the street end and Mrs B R on the inside. I had trouble finding the surveyor's stake which is sunk several inches below the surface which is why the edge bulges on the right side. I've got five Evergreen Giant Liriopes to arrange on the street edge as I did on the other side of the driveway in the main circular garden. The area behind this bed and alongside the house will be covered with weedcloth and pine bark mulch. I have to cut off those oak suckers and heavily cover and mulch that area around the tree trunk, desperately hoping to limit the continued emergence of them. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. I may add a picket fence on the property line for a future climber - but maybe not.