Madame, may I present Mr. Shovel

On Sunday deciding to remove roses was surprisingly easy - possibly from some quirk of mood or attitude. I had sunk the shovel next to 'Madame Scipion Cochet', a Hybrid Perpetual from 1872, in preparation for digging up her nearly leafless body. HP's usually aren't very black spot resistant, and though not horrible she could probably benefit from fungicide spraying - which I don't do.

She had a few leaves but only at the ends of her canes. I could put another more deserving plant in this spot. Perhaps it was time for the grand experiment to end. Perhaps Hybrid Perpetuals really aren't meant for my no-spray Florida garden. She looks decidedly unhappy. Do you see a rose in this photo? Neither did I.

Then I noticed several flower buds - six to be exact, and then I noticed absolutely no evidence of alfalfa around her. I wondered, "Did I pass her by when I was doling out the pellets?" I couldn't remember feeding her, but I can't remember a lot of things the day after I do them. Maybe I didn't feed her a few weeks ago with the other roses, and that's why she looks so pathetic. I was really giving her the benefit of the doubt because all evidence of alfalfa is gone everywhere in the garden.

Hmmm, with six flower buds she's definitely trying hard. OK, decision to shovel-prune rescinded. I gave her a bunch of alfalfa pellets (again, I think), nipped the ends of some of her non-producing canes and gave her a reprieve.

However, I left Mr. Shovel behind to remind her how serious I am and how easy she can be compost.

P.S. See the lemonade I made out of lemons? My birdbath column got broken quite a while back, and I haven't had the heart to throw it away. Well, I took a new look at it on Sunday and decided to stick it in the ground broken end down - in other words, upside down. Not too bad, ya think? Now I need to buy another glass ball for the other pedestal.

No pics due to darkness

Quite a bit of progress was made this weekend on the ugly bed. DH and I installed the two fence panels. Boy, are they heavy!! And we did this with stiff winds blowing all day Saturday. Fun, fun, fun. The panel hiding the pot area was trickier than we  (I) calculated. Perhaps didn't calculate would be more accurate. I got the posts set (no cement here - my native ground is very much like cement when compacted) and then glanced up to see that the leaning tree would probably touch (hopefully, only touch) the top of the fence. Sure enough, it just made it with no room to spare - not a centimeter. Then I went looking for the old stain we used when DH built our fence. Hmm, about 3/4 of a can. Do you think I had a drop left? No. Work finished at dark on Saturday. No pictures.

Sunday I knew I would not only be planting the ugly bed, but also saying farewell to a couple of poorly performing roses. So it was "ta ta" to naked 'Archduke Charles' (China) and 'Jeri Jennings' (Hybrid Musk) who was beginning to be beset by black spot - again. So, yellow or no yellow, she had to go.

She's a beauty, but more often than not in my garden she was quite naked.

The Walters viburnum from the ugly bed moved to the Archduke's sunnier spot, and the huge fuschia went into the ground (minus the pot - I like living dangerously) where Jeri had been.

The ugly bed received three variegated liriopes along the fence and down by the shed, a big 'Evergreen Giant' liriope that had been duking it out with my second 'Le Vesuve' in a nearby bed, three 'Super Blue' liriopes, a couple of caladium bulbs unearthed in the bed preparation and finally 'Penny Mac' hydrangea. Poor 'Penny Mac' didn't even get planted before the squirrels chewed half of her to shreds. (AAARGH!!! I hate squirrels.) After blowing the oak leaves (the last of them, hopefully) into the beds it was dark. No pictures.

Had to go to Lowe's after work today for more micro sprinkler parts. I was all prepared on Sunday to replace the male and female connectors at the hose bib and the valve to the timer until I cut the 1/2" poly while extracting 'Evergreen Giant' from under 'Le Vesuve'. Woe is me, I'll never learn to stop digging when I meet resistance. My father always said my motto should be "get a bigger hammer". How true. I didn't have a straight connector so no point in doing the other repair yesterday. Today I did the two repairs, wrapping the male  and female connectors with hardware cloth. (Chew on that, squirrels!!) Turned it on for a test run...no pressure. Ran to one end then back to the other, found the problem. It was that darn shovel again. But since I had bought extra straight connectors (how did I know?), I was prepared! Fix done. System works. Night had fallen. No pictures.

Tomorrow I only have to plant the pale lavender pink impatiens and the deep pink moss roses (portulaca) which shouldn't take long. I promise. There will be pictures tomorrow.

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.