Weekend Garden Touring

Saturday's Open Garden here went really well.  There was a gentle, steady flow of people in and out all day, and everyone appeared to enjoy themselves and learn a few new things about roses.  The stars of the day were American Pillar (as expected), Arcata Pink Globe (a rambler that I haven't showed you yet this year), and my new Miniature Garden that includes my collection of micro-miniature roses.  I walked and talked all day, back and forth and around the gardens, and I was pretty well exhausted by the end of it.

This is not my garden.

Saturday evening, my parents, my brother and sister, and our spouses met at a Japanese restaurant to celebrate my father's 79th birthday.  I am thankful every day to have both of my parents, and to have my siblings close by.  We are a close-knit bunch, and we always have WAY too much fun when we get together.

I would have loved to sleep in a bit on Sunday morning, but that never happens for me ... the dogs must keep to their schedule and all of the four-legged critters get their breakfast on time, no matter what day it is.  Even after doing this, there was no time to sit back and recharge.  My husband and I loaded up the dogs and hit the road to Maryland, to spend the day touring gardens with the Four Seasons Garden Club.  The weather was cool and sunny, and the day was perfect!

Four gardens (all very different from one another), one delicious Mexican lunch (while the dogs waited patiently in the car in their crates in the shade), 250+ miles round trip, twelve hours ... all spent in the company of some of my favorite friends, and with some folks that quickly became new friends.

As we unloaded the dogs at our second stop, a woman approached and said, "Is this Winnie?  You must be Connie."  (we all laughed)  Can't be anonymous when one is toting around a tiny blog-rock-star Chihuahua, I guess.

These photos are from the third garden we visited.  The rose is 'Tausendschoen' (Thousand Beauties) ... I think this particular specimen is more like MILLION Beauties.  It's a perfect pairing of location and plant choice.  (This once-flowering rambler is relatively thornless, so placing it in this spot on the gazebo isn't a hazard for garden guests.)

I came away from the day, as I always do, with inspiration spinning through my head ... so many wonderful new ideas to use as I continue to work to whip these gardens of mine into shape.

Sunshine, Blue Sky, and Green Leaves

As I sit here in my usual spot at the kitchen counter, the bright morning sunshine is beautiful.  Notice in the photo below how the trees are leafing out and everything is turning green.  My winter, bare-trees view of our barn in the distance will soon be gone.

Dorothy is beside me, hiding on the cluttered counter in my pile of stuff that needs to be put away.  Looks like a still life, doesn't it?  Tape dispenser, cordless phone, pile of notebooks and pads of paper, an antique clock, my scarf from yesterday ... and my sweet, odd-ball cat.

 My iPad was under the scarf ... until I picked it up to use it to take these photos.

 

I am planning to spend a few hours working in the garden  today... my scratch pad holds a list of ten roses that I hope to get planted.  For those of you who are curious about these things, the roses are:  'Garisenda', 'Thelma', 'Golden Glow', 'Coralie', 'Climbing American Beauty', 'Etain', 'Weetwood', 'Flora', 'Alchymist', and 'Queen of the Prairies'.  These are all once-blooming ramblers/climbers with large flowers, and I am planting them on the fence in my new rose border behind the greenhouse.  (I will dig out photos of them for a future post ... not taking the time to do it this morning.)

If you need me, I'll be in the garden.

The Rambler Fence Approaching Full Bloom

Open Garden Visitors yesterday were greeted by this sight as they walked down the driveway past our house toward the rose gardens in the back of the property.

The roses you see are:

1.  'Alexandre Girault'

2.  A heap of 'Auguste Roussel', 'New Dawn', and 'Ferdinand Roussel'

3.  'Jean Guichard' blending with 'Leontine Gervais'

4.  'Albertine', beside 'Rene Andre' and a root sucker of "Peggy Martin"

5.  'Paul Transon'

6.  'Aviateur Bleriot'

7.  'Alberic Barbier'

8.  'Silver Moon'

9.  'American Pillar' climbing into a cedar tree

(The name of each rose is a link to its description page on Help Me Find, a great rose reference site.

The Rambler Fence is a total mess this year, but it's a glorious mess with roses the size of haystacks.   I didn't take the time to thin or train any of them this winter like I usually do ... and it is still a spectacular sight, with thousands of flowers and buds.

I won't torture you by mentioning the fragrance (which is lovely, BTW).

How to Prune and Train Ramblers ... starring Albertine

When I tell folks that rambler roses can grow to be more than 20 feet across by the end of their third year, I usually see a look of fear spread across their faces.  With this post, I hope to show you that these roses are well within the reach of most gardeners ... and are a beautiful asset to the garden.

This is 'Albertine', a Hybrid Wichurana rambler introduced in France by Barbier & Company in 1921.  She will be our demonstration rose for this lesson.

Ramblers are once-blooming roses, which bloom profusely in the late spring on canes produced during the previous year.  New canes, which are long and flexible, grow from the base of the rose each year (called 'basal canes').  If left unpruned, a Rambler will grow into a large mound and spread across the ground.  Pruning them is very straight-forward, and can be accomplished on a large rose in about an hour. 

I find it best to do this in winter, when the canes are leafless and it's easy to see what I'm doing.  It feels good to get outside on a mild winter day and accomplish something in the garden.  (Temperatures here in Virginia have been in the upper 50's for the past two days ... perfect pruning weather!)

The older canes on 'Albertine' are those that are already attached to the fence.  The new canes produced during the growing season are the ones arching away from the fence.

The goal is to prune out old, excess canes and spindly, unproductive growth, keeping ten or twelve canes, and attaching them to the fence in a fan-shaped pattern. 

My ramblers each grow with a clematis in them, so I have the quick extra step of cutting off and removing the tangled, dead clematis stems.

This is what 'Albertine' looks like from the back of the fence.  Throughout the season, she sends shoots through the fence, seemingly heading for the neighbor's house.  Most of this growth will be removed.  Sometimes I will retain a particularly nice cane from the back of the fence, if I can maneuver it through the fence to the front side.

It is important to remove any canes that are dead or broken.

I cut out old, woody, unproductive canes, stepping back from time to time to get a good overview of my progress.  While I'm working, I keep my goal in mind ... retaining the long younger, flexible canes that will flower best in the spring. 

Don't be afraid to cut!  'Albertine' lost about half of herself while I was sorting canes and cutting.  Alberic Barbier, another rambler I pruned today, lost at least 3/4 of his canes.  He was REALLY overgrown, because I hadn't pruned him at all last year, and I only pruned lightly the year before. 

When in doubt, cut it out, is my motto.  If you cut a cane that you regret, arrange those that remain and you can cover up your mistake.  Ramblers are vigorous growers, and they recover quickly from hard pruning.

The old canes are gone, leaving the flexible new canes in the front.

The back of the fence is all tidy ...

... and the canes that remain are ready to be arranged and attached to the fence.

At this stage, I look at what I have left to see which canes will naturally go right or left, high or low.

I fine-tune my selections, and I sometimes discover that a cane is too stiff or pointing the wrong direction to go where I want it to go.  The cane marked below is healthy and I would love to have kept it, but there was no way I could have bent it enough to attach it to the fence without breaking it.

One by one, I attach the canes to the fence in a fan shape, as horizontally as I can get them without bending or breaking them. 

When rose canes are trained to at least a 45 degree angle, they produce more flowering laterals, which means that you will get more flowers. (Canes that are trained vertically will only bloom on the ends.)  The photo below shows one cane last spring, with its flowering laterals.  Look how many buds there are!

When we planted these roses, we stapled a single strand of fence wire between the boards of our fence to make it easier to attach the roses to the fence.  That's why it looks like the canes are floating between the fence boards.

Want to see the result?  I left 'Albertine' with ten healthy, flexible canes (five per side), attached to the wire.

Here is the pay off ... a well-tended rambler that produces maximum flowers on a healthy plant ... and, the way I do it, it only takes an hour or so per year to achieve.  (I'm using Leontine Gervais for this example, since these are such a good photos to show how many flowers ramblers produce.)

I make no secret of the fact that Ramblers are one of my favorite classes of roses.  Their flowers are beautiful and fragrant, their leaves are resistant to disease, they grow despite drought and neglect, and they are a powerful presence in the garden.

This is the upper part of the Rambler Fence in 2009.  The roses, left to right, are Alberic Barbier, Paul Transon, and Aviateur Bleriot. 

If you have any questions about Ramblers (or anything about roses, for that matter), send me an email or leave a comment.

'Albertine' wants to thank you for coming, and she hopes you will consider adding a Rambler or two to your garden. 

The Rambler Fence

The star of the garden, at the moment, are the ramblers on the fence on the southern border of our property.  Most of these were hybridized by Barbier and Company, who did some really imaginative work breeding Rosa wichurana (a Asian species) with tea roses.  The result was a race of roses with long, lax canes, glossy, disease-resistant foliage, and beautiful, fragrant flowers.

The driveway in this photo is my neighbor's.  The roses quietly grow through the fence, to take advantage of the southern light on their side. 

This is Ghislaine de Feligonde, the first rose in line (on the right in the first photo) and the only one on the fence that isn't bred from R. wichurana.

Paul Transon

Alexandre Girault.  I planted this rose last year, so it's still a little bit small.  It was a twig when I put it in the ground last summer.

Auguste Roussel.  Same story ... planted last summer.

Jean Guichard.  Also planted last summer, when I moved Evangeline to the Rose Field.  I didn't take a shot of the whole rose, because most of it has evaded the fence and is crawling through the weeds at its feet.  (Have I told you how much I detest weeds?)

Leontine Gervais ... probably my favorite rose on this Fence.  I measured her yesterday, and she spans 38 feet from tip to tip ... she could go a lot farther in time, if I let her. It's easy to keep her (and these others) under control with winter pruning.

Albertine

Aviateur Bleriot, planted with a dark purple viticella clematis.

Francois Juranville

Alberic Barbier, with a lavender clematis.

As the fence turns the corner, I switched from Barbier ramblers to ones hybridized by Dr. Walter Van Fleet, an American who bred roses and did wonderful plant research for the USDA in the early 20th Century.

Silver Moon

American Pillar.  I am training this rose to grow up into the cedar tree beside it.  You can see a few clusters of flowers in the tree in the second photo.  I can't wait till it reaches the top!

Just to 'keep it real', I'll show you my side of the fence.  It's the worst bed in the whole place, in terms of weeds and disarray.  I usually get a handle on this during the winter when I prune the ramblers, but winter pruning did not happen this year.  We had an unusually snowy winter, and there just wasn't a time when I could work without snow or mud up to my knees.

Albertine

Francois Juranville

I was going to take care of the weeds when the weather warmed as spring approached, but the roses had already started to send shoots along the ground, and it would have been incredibly labor intensive to pick those canes from the weeds and put them up onto the fence.  Instead, I decided that having roses blooming through drifts of clover was a good thing, and I left things as they were.  I have promised myself to get more control of the situation later in the year.  Until then, please don't judge me by my weeds.

(written by Hartwood Roses.  Hartwood Roses blog)