Earlier this week, Jeannie B. passed me the I Love Your Blog award. I am now supposed to show all of you ten things I love. Let's make this fit my Friday Flowers theme by telling you ten rosy things that I love. It may be a challenge to narrow it down to ten.
1. I love roses that climb. With climbers, I can get the maximum number of flowers into a smaller amount of floor space. Plus, there's just something magical to me about having flowers over my head.
This is the Arcade, that serves as a backdrop when we have gatherings here, and leads visitors to the Rose Field. It's a very simple structure (6 x 6 posts with 2 x 10 beams across the top), and it has a HUGE impact on the landscape.
2. I love 'Dr. W. Van Fleet'. This is the first rose I ever rustled, years ago. It was growing in the yard of a small house in Spotsylvania County. I passed this house every day on my way to go places. It sat empty and sad, as if it knew that one day the bulldozers would come. When the survey stakes were laid, and the dozer dropped off one afternoon, I swooped in the next day and took cuttings of this rose and one other that I have since identified as Shailer's Provence.
Dr. W. Van Fleet, trained onto four strands of wire on the fence beside the driveway.
3. I love being surrounded by roses. I took three photos of the Rose Field the other afternoon, and I used PhotoShop to stitch them together into a panorama to try to depict the scale of the garden and the riot of roses there. This is only half of it, if you can imagine.
(click on the photo to view it larger)
4. I love morning light. It's wonderful to wander the garden and photograph roses in morning light, especially when everything is covered with sparkling dew. After the school bus leaves, I take my last cup of coffee with me on my morning stroll to see what the roses have done overnight. The light this morning was particularly lovely.
Mrs. John Laing
La France
I don't love this little guy, or the damage he does to my smaller roses.
5. I love "Banshee". Banshee is a rose that is frequently found in cemeteries and old house sites, particularly in the north. My "Banshee" came to me as a sucker from a plant in my friend Robert's garden ... he gave it to me the first time I visited his garden years ago, and I treasure it as a memento of our friendship.
"Banshee" has very unique buds.
6. I love Barbier ramblers. Beginning in the late 19th century, the Barbier family in France was experimenting with Rosa wichurana as a means to produce rambling roses with healthy foliage. By crossing this species rose with Tea roses, they created some real treasures. One of my favorites is Leontine Gervais. She grows on my ramber fence, spanning 25+ feet from tip to tip, and she must have 500 flowers on her right now.
7. I love the new Pretzel M&Ms ... off topic for a minute. Have you tried these? They're amazing!
8. I love this seedling. A couple of years ago, I kept myself busy in winter by growing rose seeds in the basement under lights. Most of what I grew wasn't worth my time, so most of them hit the compost pile pretty quickly. This little yellow beauty is a seedling that is showing great promise in the garden. It came from seeds in a hip from an unidentified yellow rose on the Armstrong Plot in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. The leaves are dark green and pretty resistant to blackspot, and the flowers are a lovely shade of creamy yellow. If it continues to do well, I expect that it will be my very first rose registration ... now, what to name it?
9. I love simple flower forms and interesting stamens. The simple beauty of a single or semi-double rose is an acquired taste ... you either love them or you don't. I find ones like these to be some of my favorites.
Glenn Dale
Heidelberg
St. Nicholas
Innocence
10. Finally, I love my house!! I loved it from the first time I saw it, driving down this road in the early 1990's. I dreamed of owning it for 10 years, and I spent 5 years after we bought it (full-time) renovating it. We are not anywhere near finished, and I don't mind one bit. The inside is a work in progress, the outside has more projects left that I care to think about, but it's ours and it's home, and I am thankful every day to wake up here.
That's Shailer's Provence in the foreground, in a photo I took this morning. It sure is a pretty day.
Thank you, Jeannie, for reading this little blog of mine and for thinking enough of it to recommend it to your friends. It's now my turn to recognize some folks who have blogs that I love.
Three blogs that I have recently discovered and that I am now following:
... and one blog that I really love, that is now discontinued and will be going away in 4 weeks ... or so he says. Let's hope that he has a change of heart.
(Just for good measure, I'm linking this post to Tootsie Time's Fertilizer Friday. I'll head over there in a little while to see what everyone else has in bloom.)
Have a nice weekend, Everybody. I will spend tomorrow among the roses and rosarians at Tufton Farm's Open House. Sunday, I'll be back here playing hostess to the Arlington Rose Foundation. The garden is beautiful, and I hope the rain they're predicting holds off till my guests go home.
(written by Hartwood Roses. Hartwood Roses blog.)