April And May Roses

No, in case you have wondered, this is not another blog that has bitten the dust, as seem to happen to so many lately. I just have been super busy with my job and two trips in May, one to Germany and one to Santa Fe, New Mexico that I simply couldn't find the time to post. But before spring is officially over I want to show you some roses that have been blooming in my garden in the months of April and May. Sadly, even when I was at home in April and May, I often couldn't find the time to take photos, but here are some that I got of my roses.

Interestingly, because of all the rain that we got this winter and intermittently even this spring I had assumed that my roses would bloom better than for a long time, but not so much. I have a lot of rose disease this year in the garden, predominantly rose rust, but also black spot, which was almost unheard of in my garden so far. I also didn't have the time to take proper care of my roses in terms of fertilizing and that definitely results in fewer blooms, but still, I was very happy about the blooms I got despite all the odds.

Undoubtedly one of my most beautiful roses in the last two months is 'Bewitched', an older Hybrid Tea rose.

Almost all the blooms open up to perfection...

...and they have a very strong and pleasing damask scent.

The bush has struggled after it was replanted from a five pot into the ground, probably because it had been in the container for too long and was pot bound. But now, after I think two years, it is finally strutting its stuff and showing what this rose can do. 

The blooms remind me of the super big ones that you can buy for equally big bucks at the florist.

No necessity for that, if you plant 'Bewitched' in your garden. You can have your own home grown ones yourself. 

The rose has also become infected with rose rust at the end of May though, but it continues to bloom and doesn't seem to mind. 

I have often shown rosa 'Auckland Metro', one of my favorite light colored Hybrid Tea roses, on this blog. I am still in love with the blooms, but unfortunately, this rose has also become heavily infected with rose rust this year for the very first time in my garden.

Rosa 'Reine des Violettes' has admittedly small blooms, but they are exquisite and the perfume is enchanting.

I also like the informal old-fashioned flower form of this rose very much.

If you follow my blog for a while you know that I am not a fan of yellow, but rosa 'Charles Darwin's ' particular yellow tone won me over.

I have planted two bushes of this variety in my garden lately and both of them are still growing in, but so far things look very promising. Besides the gorgeous blooms, what I am the happiest about is, that both bushes haven't shown any signs of disease so far.

Love this shot of rosa 'Pierre de Ronsard'. The blooms of this rose are one of the biggest in my garden and they are jam packed with rose petals.

I think I will always be smitten with this rose.

Rosa 'Yolande d'Aragon' is a wonderful Old Garden Rose with a very strong and lovely fragrance, but in my garden, this variety has disease problems and the blooms have also trouble to withstand the strong winds that we receive on our top of the hill location. The blooms get often so damaged by the wind that they become unsightly.

Not all is rosy in a predominantly organic no spray garden. Aphids can have a feast, but usually, with a strong ray of water from the hose, I can keep them in check.

This is rosa 'Rose de Rescht, which I had grown for a long time in a five gallon container. Lately, I have removed the second of my 'Our Lady of Guadalupe' roses because of increasing problems with powdery mildew and replaced it with this variety. I am curious how 'Rose de Rescht' will fair in the same location. It is too early to say anything, though.

A scene from the front yard. To the left you see my last remaining rosa 'Our Lady of Guadalupe' and to the right rosa 'The Prince'. I am quite pleased how this part of the garden looks, especially considering the little bit shady location.

A closer look at rosa 'Our Lady of Guadalupe'. Despite an almost ongoing infestation with powdery mildew, this bush is very floriferous.

I am excited about the first bloom of this recent acquisition. This is rosa 'Princess Alexandra of Kent', one of the newer varieties bred by David Austin. The first bloom was huge, very full, and had an exquisite color. It is not clearly to see in the photo but is was a warm pink shade with some yellow hints at the base. Can't wait to see the next flowers.

Rosa 'White Meidiland' is really coming into her own. This rose is growing in an unsuitable area for roses, because it is so shady and the rose still manages to do well, blooms very prolifically...

...and produces nice big sprays of magnificent blooms.

My last contender for today is rosa 'Mary Rose', which you can call almost a classic by now. It is bred by David Austin and blooms very early in the season and repeats very well. It has a white sport called 'Winchester Cathedral', which I would love to grow in my garden as well.

I sincerely hope you enjoyed this post about some of the roses that have been blooming in my Southern California garden in the last two months.

As I am writing this, I am with my husband on vacation in the Cotswolds, one of the most beautiful areas of England again and the next posts will be about some of the fabulous gardens, pretty little towns and picturesque villages that we have seen here. So I would love for you to come back soon and visit with me this wonderful part of the world. It is truly a gardener's paradise.

If you want to get a glimpse of the Cotswolds see my posts from our vacation last year in the same area here:

Hidcote Manor Garden I
The beautiful village of Blockley in the Cotswolds, England I
The beautiful village of Blockley in the Cotswolds, England II
An English Afternoon Tea in Bradford on Avon, England


Warm regards,

Christina

I am linking up to
Cedar Hill Farmhouse - The Scoop // Between Naps On The Porch - Metamorphosis Monday // Dwellings - The Heart of Your Home - Amaze Me Monday //  A Stroll Thru Life - Inspire Me Tuesday // Sweet Sensations - Celebrate Your Story // Savvy Southern Style - Wow Us Wednesdays // A Southern Daydreamer - Outdoor Wednesday // A Delightsome Life - Home And Garden Thursday // 21 Rosemary Lane - Share Your Style //  Peonies and Orange Blossoms - Thursday Favorite Things // French Country Cottage - Feathered Nest Friday // Rattlebridge Farm - Foodie Friday and Everything Else // Shabby Art Boutique - Create, Bake, Grow & Gather // How Sweet The Sound - "Anything Goes" Pink Saturday // My Soulful Home - Sunday at Home //  Angie The Freckled Rose - Dishing It & Digging It // Dwellings - The Heart of Your Home - Amaze Me Monday  // Everyday Living - A Gardens Galore //

Catching You Up

I have gotten behind with blogging about the happenings in my own garden and I would like to catch you up with its development and what I have done from February to mid-March. All photos shown in this post are from this time period.

Let's start with the White Garden Bed in the backyard. Not too much white there at the moment, but at least plants are actively starting to grow and green up.

I removed a self-seeded hardy geranium located between the small white sculpture and the green mount of a plant to the left which is an alstroemeria. First, this hardy geranium looked so promising, because it was nice, healthy, and grew strongly, but then it turned out that it had insignificantly small flowers and I decided to discard it.

Close-up of a bloom of hardy geranium 'Biokovo'. Somehow I really like this photo! The blooms of 'Biokovo' are a very light and soft pink, but I think they are still acceptable to have in a White Garden Bed.

Looking a little bit more to the left of the White Garden Bed. The "brown bushes" that you see behind the white column with the silver gazing ball are the old flower stalks of gaura lindheimeri 'Belleza White' which needed to be cut back.

The gaura is new to me since last year and I didn't know at what time to cut it back. Well, I definitely waited too long and next year I certainly won't look at these brown, ugly, and dried up flower stalks that long anymore.

All cut back! A little spring clean-up can make such a difference in the garden!

Looking to the right side of my backyard. The huge rose that has started to leave out is 'Pierre de Ronsard', one of my most beloved ones. I finally planted rosa 'Charles Darwin' to its right. Even though in the photo the new rose looks tiny, in reality, it is not. Both roses are freshly fertilized. I keep the fertilizer in place by putting some mulch over it, hence the darker color of the soil surrounding the roses. The mulch itself becomes a mild fertilizer for the roses over time.

This year the leaves of 'Pierre de Ronsard' look so juicy and healthy, but...

...if you take a closer look at the longer canes you see that they have trouble to leave out. It is high time that the organic fertilizer gets broken down by microorganisms so that it is accessible for the rose. 

Instead of only showing things that go well in my garden I will also present photos of areas that don't do so great. In the background, you see my calla lilies. They don't seem to like growing in this location. The rose in the foreground is 'Heritage' and also seems to have trouble to leave out properly. This whole bed needs to be fertilized and a good layer of mulch and I bet things will become better. I often struggle to get all the garden chores done timewise. I guess that may sound familiar to some of you.

Talking about things that don't go so well: Not all rose leaves are so healthy like the ones of 'Pierre de Ronsard' that I have shown further above. Some roses have responded to the seasonal conditions with lots of rose rust. The leaves above are from rosa 'Bewitched', 'Auckland Metro', and 'Moonstone'. I also see much more blackspot than usual this spring. I believe the increase of both of these rose diseases is due to all the lovely winter rains that we were having.

I don't spray and won't do anything about these infected leaves other than pulling them off and/or wait until they fall off by themselves and the roses grow new leaves. Rose varieties that consistently show very little disease resistance in my garden get eliminated.

Here is another wonderful example of healthy rose foliage: These are the new leaves of rosa 'Grandmother's Hat'. This rose has shown exceptional disease resistance in my garden over a couple of years.

On a totally different note: I have sown Sweet Peas in February. Probably too late for my climate though, but I just had to give it a try, since I didn't get around to do it earlier. Maybe I am lucky and I see a few blooms before the summer heat sets in.

Moving on to the front yard. I was going back and forth forever if I should plant another rose between the two existing roses, 'Charles Darwin' to the left and 'Cymbaline' to the right, in this bed or an evergreen plant.

Space for roses is scarce in my garden and I always try to plant another rose wherever I can, just because I love them so much, but I think three roses planted in a row would look boring in this area. They would roughly have the same height, the same leaves and in the winter time, I would have to live with three dormant plants. So I decided against it.

Initially, this bed was totally flat, but over time I have tried to build a small berm by just putting more and more soil down. The photo doesn't show it well but this bed is slightly elevated by now.

Before I planted anything I dumped another big bale (three cubic feet) of garden soil in the middle of the bed. This is why this part of it looks darker than the rest. I can't tell you how much soil this border has simply "swallowed". The soil just decomposes and raising the level of the area seems to be a Sisyphus work.

The evergreen that I decided to go with is this yucca-like, drought tolerant plant that I got from a very nice gardener that I hardly knew on a garden tour and who generously gifted it to me along with five of its siblings a long time ago. The mother plant had formed a nice trunk roughly about the height of the Pygmy Date Palms of my neighbor in the background and that is exactly what I want for this area.

I intend to underplant the yucca-like plant with some flowering perennials to bring color and a little bit of diversity to this bed. 

And here it is planted in its new home. It still looks tiny but I expect it to grow relatively fast. 

The gardener who gifted me this plant told me the proper name and I jotted it down on a tiny piece of paper that unfortunately is long lost. Can anyone of you, dear readers, identify this plant? I would be thankful if you would let me know in a comment. 

Going over to the other side of the front yard my containers of stock are still looking nice and fulfill their purpose of bringing some spring color into the yard, especially when the roses were just leaving out.
.

To the right of the scene in the photo further above is a "problem area" I have been struggling with since we moved into this house: A small strip of soil only about fifteen inches deep. Underneath the soil level, the footing of the decorative wall comes out a couple of inches which makes the growing space for plants even smaller. And as if this weren't enough the whole area is densely rooted through by palm roots from a huge Queen Palm which is planted in the very front of the front yard. You can see the trunk in the photo above this one.

No plants have been able to withstand these conditions for a longer period and I am helping myself out here by placing another container filled with beautiful stock. Nonetheless, it is about time to replant this strip. The puny plant to the left is a miniature rose called 'Lavender Crystal', which has very lovely blooms, but isn't vigorous and is suffering from blackspot. I was tempted to throw it away for that reason, but couldn't do it. So I rescued and planted it into a container to see if it would recover if the growing conditions aren't that hostile. To the right, you see the daylily 'Gentle Shepherd' which barely hangs in there, but I hope will recover with a dose of fertilizer, more water, and the sun reaching it a little more as the season progresses.

Here you can see the root ball of rosa 'Lavender Crystal'. What was left over once I entangled the palm roots from it is tiny! No wonder the rose wasn't doing well.

Stepping a little bit back you can see a wider shot of the area. I planted a Martha Washington geranium 'Regal Elegance Rose Bicolor', which had been outgrowing its container, in place of the rose. Martha Washington geraniums have been pretty tough plants here, which can take a bit of shade and still bloom, so I have hope that this plant will like it here.

Here you can see the geranium a bit better! This place is very hard to photograph because of the harsh contrast between sun and shade. In the foreground rosa 'Our Lady of Guadalupe' is leaving out well after a hard pruning this winter but is already suffering from powdery mildew.

In one of the next posts, I will show you how I fixed this area. I am quite pleased to say that I found a very nice solution!

To end on a rosy note I leave you with a photo of rosa 'Bewitched'. I just love the elegance of her very elongated buds. It turned into a big fragrant flower which I enjoyed cutting for the house.

Hope the new week is going well for you and nice warm spring weather is allowing you to be outside.

See you in the garden!

Christina

I am linking up to

Angie The Freckled Rose - Dishing It & Digging It  //  botanic bleu - Monday Social  // Dwellings - The Heart of Your Home - Amaze Me Monday  //  Between Naps On The Porch - Metamorphosis Monday  //  Cedar Hill  Farmhouse - The Scoop  //  Coastal Charm - Show And Share  //  Sweet Sensations - Celebrate Your Story  //  Savvy Southern Style - Wow Us Wednesdays  //  A Southern Daydreamer - Outdoor Wednesday  //  Have a Daily Cup of Mrs. Olson - Share Your Cup  //  A Delightsome Life - Home and Garden Thursday  //  21 Rosemary Lane - Share Your Style  //  Rattlebridge Farm - Foodie Friday and Everything Else  //  French Country Cottage - Feathered Nest Friday  //  Shabby Art Boutique - Create, Bake, Grow & Gather  //   Peonies & Orange Blossoms - Thursday Favorite Things  //  How Sweet The Sound - "Anything Goes" Pink Saturday  //  One More Time - Share It One More Time  //  My Soulful Home - Sundays at Home  

Busy With Winter Rose Care And More...

Since my last post about my garden from the beginning of January, I have been mainly busy deleaving and pruning all my roses.

Even though my garden is small some of my roses aren't and it is quite an undertaking to accomplish this job each year. The photo above shows rosa 'Pierre de Ronsard' in all her deleaved and pruned architectural glory.

The Pierre is still a little lonely in this bed, but I finally made the decision to plant rosa 'Charles Darwin' to his side. Do you see the big hole to his right lined by white irrigation pipes? That is where Charles will go and I hope these two will flower well and harmonize together

I have rosa 'Charles Darwin' already grown to a decent size. He is the rose in the big container in the middle of the picture. I hope his huge root ball will stand up to the root competition with the Queen Palms and the Strelitzia Nicolais in this bed.

But before he could be transplanted I needed to deleave and prune him, too. What you can't see on the photo is that there was plenty of oxalis, an obnoxious weed here in my neck of the woods, growing in the container as well. Boy, did I stung my fingers bloody to get this nasty stuff out of the container.

I have decided to reduce the number of roses that I grow in containers on our terrace first of all because the roses don't do so well at this location in the increased summer heat in the last couple of years. But secondly they need to be deadheaded absolutely diligently otherwise all the petals are ending up in our pool, which is close by. Because of time reasons I haven't been able to deadhead the roses daily last summer and the pool often became a mess.

On the other side of our kitchen door, which leads to the terrace, is an identical arrangement of containers and plants. My idea is to replace both roses in the biggest containers with either citrus trees or small tropical palms and switch out the miniature roses and boxwoods with herbs. I think it will be nice to have herbs handy for cooking so close to the kitchen.

So with this mind, I decided to repot rosa 'Jilly Jewel', the miniature rose in the foreground to the left, into a black plastic container and put her in the pot ghetto for now until I can decide where to place her in the garden.

Here you see rosa 'Jilly Jewel' pruned and in her new larger container.

When I was at one of the big box stores to buy more compost for the garden they had organic herbs for sale and this Spearmint jumped right into my shopping card. I assume that this will be very easy to grow and I love to pick a few leaves of mint to brew a tea or decorate a desert. 

I could literally see the Spearmint perking up under my eyes the moment it was repotted and watered. 

This is how the combo looked at the end. The fresh green of the mint is so nice but makes the suffering boxwood look even more miserable. I have to find another place for it soon. 

When I was at the big box store I also stumbled over these stock and couldn't leave them behind. Last year I have fallen in love with stock for its beautiful blooms, I especially like the double ones, and wonderful very strong fragrance. These found spots in the front yard which I will show you in my next garden post.

I am also busy like a bee going through all my potted own-root roses, deleaving, pruning, it is often actually more a very gentle shaping, and some get re-potted like these three. I forgot the names of the two to the left but I know the one to the right is rosa 'Charles Rennie Mackintosh'.

Here they got their hair cut and also have been potted up from two-gallon containers into five-gallon containers. 'Charles Rennie Mackintosh' is the one in the middle now.

The view of my White Garden Bed. All rose are deleaved and pruned and some of them have started to leave out again already, even though this is hard to see in the photo.

Each year I have the tradition to order a few more own-root roses in the winter. This time I have ordered for the very first time from David Austin Roses directly. The ones of you who follow my blog know that I am a big lover of roses bred by David Austin but so far I only got his creations from other nurseries.

The box they come in looks pretty nice, don't you think?

After opening the box I was surprised to find a rose only wrapped in a big plastic bag, Nothing to keep the roots moist.

Freeing the rose from the plastic it turns out that it has survived the travel rather well. I ordered 'Princess Alexandra of Kent', a wonderful saturated pink rose with big blooms and a great strong fragrance. I have seen this rose in English Gardens and it simply blew me away. I can only hope that it will do as well in my garden here in Southern California.

But what is that? Do you see the one cane being completely bent and almost looking like a snake? How did this happen?

I decided to cut it off at the bending part and hope that new growth will sprout from it. Wish me luck that the rose will leave out soon. Only then you know if it really survived the transport and transplant.

I am looking forward to receiving three more roses from David Austin this year. Find out which varieties I ordered soon here on the blog. They are also own-root roses, but they come planted in two-quart containers. They will be much smaller than 'Princess Alexandra of Kent' the bare root own-root rose that you see here in the photos.

After all these bare rose canes I would like to leave you with a photo of the refreshing green leaves and lovely white flowers of campanula poscharskyana 'Alba', also called the White Serbian Bellflower. I was very surprised to see it bloom so early in my garden. I wonder if there is a correlation with all the rain that we were getting this winter. 

Hope you are all enjoying a nice weekend!

See you in the garden!

Warm regards,

Christina

I am linking up to
Angie The Freckled Rose - Dishing It & Digging It
botanic bleu - Monday Social
Dwelling - The Heart of Your Home - Amaze Me Monday
Cedar Hill Farmhouse - The Scoop
Coastal Charm - Show and Share
Savvy Southern Style - Wow Us Wednesdays
A Delightsome Life - Home and Garden Thursday
21 Rosemary Lane - Share Your Style
Peonies & Orange Blossoms - Thursday Favorite Things
Have a Daily Cup of Mrs. Olson - Share Your Cup
French Country Cottage - Feathered Nest Friday
Home Sweet The Sound - "Anything Goes" Pink Saturday
One More Time - Share It One More Time
My Soulful Home - Sundays at Home