The Pillar in the Diamond

Friday, Nov. 21, 2003 – 3:30 p.m.

2003-11-21 3:30

One of the ideas that I got at the fall rose convention was to put a pillar in the middle of the diamond center bed. For the past 4 years, the diamond bed has grown wildflowers. This past year this bed did not look as good as in the past. I guess that over the years, the perennials have been the only things in the bed… except for the weeds. My problem is I can’t tell the difference between a wildflower that has not bloomed yet and a real weed. Ok, time to expand my garden… someone gave me the idea of taking an 8 ft 4×4 and planting 2 ft of it in center of the bed. This will leave me 6 ft of post to wrap and otherwise train a climbing rose around. Now I just need to figure out which rose or roses to do.

One idea is to do two different kinds of roses, a repeat bloomer and a non-repeat bloomer, one on each side and twining round, one clockwise the other counter-clockwise. Or I could do two rose of the same type, one a climbing variety, the other a bush variety. The idea is that climbers tend to get quite sparse at their base so you put a bush variety of the same rose in next to the climber to provide a more continuous appearance (Paul Zimmerman of Ashdown Roses presented this idea in one of his talks).

Another thing to consider in this selection process is that some climbers are more…. vigorous… than others. One catalog had their climbers broken into two categories: Vigorous and Mannerly. In this case, I think I need something in the Mannerly category rather than the vigorous. After all, I don’t need something that grows to 30 ft. in this location.

Leave a Reply