[Sigh] Summer has been busy. I haven’t been successful in posting once a week. So here is a bit of a catch-up post….
Early last month, I took my “Roses in the Middle Ages” poster to the “Fiber & Foliage” event in Yarnvid (Richmond VA). Mostly fiber (and some blacksmithing) arts stuff and not much gardening talk at the event. A number of folk were interested in my stuff…. next time I need to remember to take my box of dried roses. I did take a Rosa Mundi and Cabbage rose plants in pots…. another chance to demo prickly green sticks.
The weekend that followed was Atlantia University and for once I did not teaching my Roses Then and Now. Someone beat me to it! A lady from up north taught a class called “History of Roses Beginning in Ancient Rome”. I attended the class and I think I made the instructor quite nervous. My big mistake was directly contradicting one of the things the instructor said (she said yellow roses are not period), right at the end of class. I really stuck my foot in it; apparently this was her first time teaching at University. Way to go, dude, just crush her soul while you’re at it. I should have talked with her afterward, one on one, and suggested she looks into some additional sources, rather than challenge her directly. Mea culpa. You know all those workshops I have been participating in about giving feedback? Apparently I forgot much of it. [sigh] yet more work to do.
Then it rained for the last two weeks of September. If I had had any thought to do stuff with the rose garden, that kind of squelched it. At this point, you can’t see the pots of Rosa Mundi for the weeds in the bed with the irises. I have seen a couple of blooms on the Souvenir dela Malmaison and on Alister Stella Gray and Crepescule. I still have not gotten any lime applied to the beds so the pH is still way off.
On a positive note, I did take four rooted cuttings of the Cherokee Rose (R. Laevigata) over to Muir. These were cutting I had made last year and had grown out. I remember that I had protected them over last winter and they had been pretty hearty then… I had actually loaded them up earlier in the month but held onto them for another two weeks as Muir was going to be gone to visit her mother in N.O. and would not be able to tend them (the fact is that it basically rained the whole time she was gone, and then some, and the roses would have been fine… but we didn’t know that at the time). Anyway, as I have talked about before, these were cuttings off the R. laevigata that I have grown from a cutting I took from the bush at her family’s house in Ocean Springs, MS while I was in O.S. after Katrina. I am happy that I have been able to give her cutting from that bush.