December Roses

Since this is my first post in 2013 I would like to start by wishing a happy, healthy New Year to all of my dear readers! May your gardens flourish and I hope you find the time to thoroughly enjoy them!

This year I decided to continue with my little blog tradition of showing you the best roses of each month from my garden.

December brought us relatively cool weather for Southern California circumstances and also quite a bit of rain in comparison to what we usually see here. That is, of course, very good for the garden and all plants, but not so much for the rose blooms themselves. Many got ruined by the rain, were balling, and ended up as a brown mush of petal substance. Not at all photogenic! Apart from that I was traveling for two weeks last month and therefore surely missed a chance to take a picture or two of roses that bloomed well.

Still, there were some flowers that I was able to catch: These are my best roses from December 2012!

This is my favorite photo from last month! It shows 'Baronne Edmond de Rothschild', a Hybrid Tea rose bred by Meilland in 1968. The rose has large full blooms with a wonderful white silvery reverse and great fragrance.

Here is another shot of 'Baronne Edmond de Rothschild'. The flower to the right is showing the white reverse very well.




The most floriferous rose and certainly one of the most beautiful was 'Madame Alfred Carriere'. I am so fond of the almost white globular blooms.




The color of 'William Shakespeare 2000' was a surprising almost clear red in the cooler weather conditions, which is not so much to my liking. I sure hope, that the blooms will turn into the darker bluish crimson red that I love as the weather warms up, again.




'Mary Rose', always has a cool pink color no matter what the season is, which I absolutely adore. I will never ever get tired of pink roses!




'Moonstone' had a whole winter flush of flowers. The blooms are huge and very pretty, but the bush itself is the sickest in my whole rose collection. It suffers so badly from rust and powdery mildew it is unbelievable. The rose is still relatively young and sometimes they become more healthy as they get established, but I think at this point that 'Moonstone' needs to be sprayed to be successfully grown in my garden. I do the opposite, I garden organically and don't spray at all and I am not sure if I want to make an exception for this rose. If only she wouldn't have so extraordinarily beautiful blooms...




'Vi's Violet' is a really lovely mauve miniature rose bred by Ralph Moore in 1991.

I have her growing in a container in a very sheltered position in front of a heat reflecting off-white wall. Besides the fact that she is blooming right now, what I really like about this rose is that it seems to stay relatively small. Many miniature roses are becoming as tall or almost as tall as regular floribundas here in Southern California. There is nothing mini about them except the size of the blooms, which makes them unsuited for growing in small containers. Luckily this one appears to be happy residing in its blue pot!

I hope, I don't bore you by posting pictures of 'Charles Darwin' over the last four months. This rose is simply blooming and blooming and blooming and that is why he is showing up frequently in the last posts. It is one of the few yellow roses that I own and I love the changeability of the color. Last month he was a pretty, warm, orange yellow. 

'Bewitched' surprised me with a perfect elongated bud on an otherwise almost leaveless bush.

After struggling with powdery mildew quite a bit in the beginning of her life in my garden 'Irresistible', another miniature rose, is doing very well now in her terracotta container. On her last blooms of the season she is showing small specks of red. Winter freckles?

'Grandmother's Hat' has certainly bloomed less over the last couple of months than I would like her to, but when she opens a bloom it is a beauty!

Hopefully 2013 will be a good year for the roses, that will bring plenty of blooms to your and my garden. I don't know about you, but I can't wait for the spring flush already!

See you in the garden!

Christina

Parham House and Gardens, England - I

The weather is grey and dreary right now and I am not in the mood to garden, even though the roses are begging me to be pruned to get ready for spring, again. So I thought instead of forcing myself to go out in the yard. I better finish the year by writing one more post about our trip to England at the end of May this year.

One of the first estates that we were visiting during our vacation was Parham House and Gardens. Parham is something very special and if you are in the area make sure you don't miss it. The day we visited, the weather wasn't the best either, it was quite hazy in parts, but I will never forget the impression the grand estate made on us. First you need to drive through a deer park before you see anything of the estate. This alone is an experience by itself. Then you drive around one more corner and suddenly there it is: The Parham House. I can't imagine how the peope must have felt who lived here and owned the house, when they were approaching their home. Do you get ever used to such grandeur?

From the outside Parham House is certainly impressive, but it doesn't feel necessarily welcoming or friendly in terms of the architecture. At least that is the way I perceive it. It feels more like a huge house that leaves a first time visitor speechless staring at it with the mouth open just because of its humongous fortress like appearance that demands attention and respect. Inside however it comes across in a very different way and is well worth a visit. There are many interesting antique furniture and the rooms are quite beautiful. Especially memorable is the Long Gallery. So I would recommend if you visit bring plenty of time to see the house, the gardens and maybe even the extensive park and leave some time to rest and have lunch or tea in the 16th century Big Kitchen.

Scene of the ancient deer park of 300 acres that surrounds Parham House and Gardens. The park is very beautiful with rolling hills and lovely trees and I am sure it is worth a walk, but unfortunately we didn't have the time for it.




To the left side of Parham House is a chapel that belongs to the house. I love how it is surrounded by ancient trees.

As you can see on this photo Parham House estate is much bigger than "just the main house". There is actually a complex of outbuildings attached. The foundation stone for Parham has been laid in 1577. Since then it has been only owned by three families and was always a private home. It was opened to the public in 1948 for the very first time, because the owners wanted to share the beauty of Parham with visitors. Now Parham is owned by a Charitable Trust but one family member, Lady Emma Barnard, is still living there with her family.

This photo shows a kind of courtyard that is located between the entrance to the main house on the left side (not visible on this picture) and the outbuildings to the right.

I love the wisteria climbing the ancient walls,...

...soften the hard surfaces and making them more friendly.

When we entered the gardens this was the first view we got. A most impressive very long double border planted predominantly in the colors of yellow and purple interspersed with green leaved plants.

This is the entry to the right of the long border to the estate nursery. Lucky people, who live close by and can bring a plant tressure home with them.

In the long border there were many interesting and beautiful plant combinations worth having a closer look. I loved this one of the purple flowering plant, which I don't know the name of, and the bronze fennel. As always, dear readers, please feel free to identify a plant if you know it.

Beautiful crimson thistle like plant.

Same plant surrounded by companions. Again, I love the yellow, purple and crimson color combination.

The tulips had been over but the fennel was coming on strong.

What was interesting is that the yellow color was brought into the border not by flowering plants but solely by yellow leaved plants. Smart idea that can inspire!

Parham Gardens contained many lovely sculptures like this one. Isn't it adorable how the old stone statue is surrounded by the yellow leaved shrubs?

I really liked the wooden climbing structure that served as a divider between the double border and another garden room to the left. If I remember correctly behind the visual divider was a fruit orchard.

The gardeners at Parham made good use of the planting principle of repetition of plants in drifts, which Gertrud Jekyll is so famous for. They replanted the bronze fennel every couple of feet,...

...the yellow leaved shrubs and purple flowering plants,

and the crimson blooming thistle with again a yellow leaved plant in the background.

Looking back into the other direction towards the entrance to the double yellow and purple border. I think that these beds are masterfully done and you can learn a lot by carefully observing how they were planted. I appreciated that plantings were very unobtrusive, but at the same time there was a lot of interest and pleasure to find for the eye. I hope you enjoyed seeing this border in my photos as much as I did by putting this post together.

The Parham Gardens were to big to cover them in just one entry. So I will continue to show you more of this lovely place in another post soon. Besides the plants themselves, one thing that stood out for me in this garden was the exceptionally beautiful statuary that was tastefully scattered throughout the estate. The statues added so much to enhance the overall enjoyment of the gardens and sparked my desire to place one in my own small garden. If I only could have a statue similar to those at Parham for my own little paradise! They are so much more beautiful and have so much more character than the poured concrete sculputres that you can find in garden centers in the US. Of course I am sure they come with a very different price tag as well, but to me it is worth saving for a beautiful, quality statue for years, than getting a cheap unsatisfying one right away. Eventually I will get there!

See you in the garden!

Christina

Happy Holidays!

Just want to pause for a moment and sent out my warmest holiday wishes to everyone, who is reading my blog!

And if you are celebrating Christmas, of course, Merry Christmas to you! I hope you have a wonderful time with friends and family. May there be lots of moments of peace, joy, happiness, and love, which I feel it is all about.

My husband and I we are celebrating Christmas today on Christmas Eve already as it is the tradition in Germany. It will be an intimate afternoon and evening with an English Afternoon Tea follow by a cozy dinner later at night.

 As you can easily see in our home today it is all about good food and spending quality time together!

I better finish this post now, since the tea sandwiches on the photos were from yesterday and are long gone! Today we will be having a special kind of scone, which I baked already, but the sandwiches and other little palate teasers still must be prepared (my husband's specialty) and the table needs to be set up nicely (my job)!

One more thing I would like to share with you. I am most excited about my early Christmas gift: Eight 3' x 2' holes and three more areas, where sprinklers have been put in. Yay! One hole is already filled with a hydrangea, which we planted yesterday. I hope to show you photos very soon.

The rose that you can see in today's photos is 'Madame Alfred Carriere'. I potted her up into a big terracotta container lately, fertilized her, and she is blooming like in spring.

See you in the garden!

Christina