Sunday, Feb. 10, 2013 – 7:27 p.m.
2013-02-10 7:27
Wow! Has it really been almost 19 months since I last posted?
Wedding Rose Project
Well, the wedding rose project went VERY WELL. I was able to have beautiful bushes with blooms for the wedding. We moved the pots up to Biltmore in the enclosed trailer, which worked pretty well. The biggest issue was that the pots were very heavy and since the pots themselves were plastic, the rims on some pots broke. Fortunately, we were able to set them up so the broken stuff didn’t show. Coming home, however, they got even more beat up and one pot had to be replaced in 2012.
The bushes got less TLC during 2012 and it showed. Lost one bush completely (Full Sail), one is now just 1 cane (Secret’s Out) and a third got cut back a bunch. [sigh] After pennsic, I got back to spraying them and that helped.
At this point, I have ordered a Disneyland rose to put in the place of the completely dead one and a Voodoo to replace the one that is a single cane. Since Disneyland is one of L’s favorite varieties (and she has tried twice before to grow it), maybe having it by the kitchen door, where we (I) can keep an eye on it, it will do better… third time’s the charm!
The Garden… OH MY!
So, I have not done much maintenance on the actual rose garden in the past 19 months. There has been some weeding and several roses bushes end up going to the great compose bin in the sky. Let see if I can remember which ones… Disneyland, Suffolk, R. moschata & R. moschata plena, the bearded irises (well, I dug them up to divide them then replant elsewhere… but they just didn’t get replanted… Muir got a few of them though. Pretty much all the roses that have been in pots out in the garden (Daity Bess, Blaze, etc).
“The jungle” bed still has not gotten tamed and many of the landscape timbers on many of the beds have rotted away… which leads me to this weekend.
Rebooting the rose garden
So, I started working on the jungle bed this weekend. I went through and putlled out as much of the grass as I could as well as obvious weeds (like wild grape). Basically I think there are 4 different rose varieties left in this bed:
- Glowing Peace
- Europeana
- Rosa Mundi
- Madame Hardy
I dug up the Glowing Peace and put it in a pot. Europeana was shovel pruned. That leave Madame Hardy (a damask) and Rosa Mundi (a gallica)… the Rosa Mundi has basically spread through the entire bed so it may be hard to tell what is Madame Hardy and what is Rosa Mundi (at least until they leaf out and bloom). However, my plan is to rehabilitate this beed THIS year and that means getting all this under control. Therefore I will need to dig up and save the stuff where M.H ardy was planted and some of the other plants that I am pretty sure are R. Mundi.