... and on Friday, She Rests.

Those of you who are familiar with my gardens will be in shock over the changes on the Rambler Fence.  It doesn't look like this anymore, at least for now.

Like some of my other gardens, the Rambler Fence was overlooked for a while (years, in fact) and it became like this:

In my imagination, I could see that it could be beautiful this again, but it was going to take some drastic measures.

Old photo, when 'Leontine Gervais' was nearly perfect.

How's this for drastic?

For the past few months, I have been clearing the fence by cutting the ramblers back to only a few canes.  Duplicate roses, like 'Albertine' and 'Paul Transon', were removed ... replaced by 'Queen of the Prairies' and 'Shower of Gold' from the Pot Ghetto.  Dead Tea roses have been dug out.  (The winter of 2013 was much colder than average, and my tall, mature Tea Roses were cut almost to the ground by freeze damage.  2014's winter froze them again and few of them recovered.)  I replaced some of these right away (more roses out of the Pot Ghetto) and other empty places will be filled with roses from last year's propagation ... which aren't ready to be outside on their own quite yet.

Last fall, I realigned and expanded the east end of this garden.  It used to follow the fence in an eight-foot-wide strip.  Now, the fence makes a corner and the bed continues straight ... which gave me room for ten new roses in that space!  I planted the roses last fall.  They're really small, but they're already putting on some new growth.

The part of the bed to the right of the red line is the new section.

Yesterday (Thursday), I faced a situation where I had no choice.  My truck was full of a new load of two yards of mulch, rain was predicted for Friday, and I need my truck to be empty for a nursery run on Saturday.  It will be no surprise to you that I challenged myself spread all that mulch to empty the truck by the end of the day ... by myself, because there was no help available.

First, I freshened up the old mulch from last fall in the expanded part of the garden by adding a scant one-inch of fresh mulch over the old.

I wanted this LONG garden to have a unified look when I was finished, instead of the patchwork mulch that was there when I started.

Last year's faded mulch, last month's not-quite-so faded mulch, and last week's load of new mulch.

You can see the new roses a little bit better in this photo ... they're so tiny.

Four-and-a-half hours after I started, the truck was empty.  I allowed time for water breaks and lunch, but I was still completely spent by the time I finished.

What I have now is a large expanse of what looks like bare mulch.  I don't like it like this.   I hold onto the promise that it will soon be filled with roses, and that this emptiness will be a thing of the past.

Panoramic photo of the finished bed.  My new iPhone totally rocks!

As I said in the title of this post, today I will rest.  Moving so much mulch by myself probably wasn't a wise thing to do.   It wore me out, and my shoulders are protesting. It is raining today, which forces me to do things other than yard work.  I welcome the break ... as I look out the window and see the results of my effort ... and I am raring to get back out there and do more ... as soon as I can.  It's spring, and this is how I roll.

Laying Out the Labyrinth

I'm one who likes to walk and think, and the idea of a Labyrinth in my garden has stuck in my head for a while now.  I still have about 300 roses in pots left to plant, so I cannot bear to spare the time or space preparing an area where roses are not destined to live.  Over the weekend, while scribbling modifications on graph paper for the design of my Cemetery Garden back by the barn, I had a brainstorm ... I could turn this GARDEN into a labyrinth!  It took some doing, but I think I have it.

each square = four feet.

Originally, this garden was going to be made with concentric squares ... eight-foot beds and four-foot paths, with a central aisle.  The design needed only a small modification to the path on the left to create a switch-back element to make it into a labyrinth!

A labyrinth is not a maze.  It is a winding path that takes you from the outside to the center, with one path in and out.  I saw a great labyrinth at a house by a cemetery that The Husband and I were visiting this spring.

The area I have for this is a sixty-foot square.  I was out there all morning on Saturday, measuring and staking and laying string, getting the beds and paths laid out just right.

aerial photo taken from the loft of the barn.

Here's the same photo, with a little Photoshop magic to show you the paths.

Yesterday morning, I sprayed the whole area with herbicide to kill off the grass and weeds.  I did this once already this year, but the weather and other factors conspired against me and I never got the garden laid out or planted and the area filled up with weeds again.  Turns out that this was a good thing, because I wouldn't have thought of this new design at that time.  With cooler fall weather now, things are growing more slowly so the herbicide will take longer to work.  I'm okay with that, because I know it's doing its thing, while I'm off working on other things ... it's like I'm multi-tasking, the easy way.

All staked out!  (doesn't everyone carry their tools in a cat litter bucket?)

If you are curious about how to lay out a labyrinth, here is a diagram that I found online that makes it simple to do.

I spent a while yesterday afternoon going through my pots of roses, inventorying and dividing them into groups.  As of now, I have 41 that are destined for this new garden, with a few more 'maybes'.  Most of these are Noisettes and Chinas and Gallicas, a few ramblers, and a couple of climbers on the arched entrance ... roses that are perfectly at home in old cemeteries, which is what this garden was originally intended to represent.  The design is the only thing that has changed ... the roses remain the same.