The Making of the Rose Field

Sarah, across the pond at Modern Country Style, is having a link party ... inviting us to share our gardens at her Garden Party.  She asked me, in her lovely English way, if I would please join in.  It's winter, and it was really cold and windy yesterday, so let's see if I can make everyone feel a bit warmer with a dose of summer roses.

Gratuitous rose photo that has nothing to do with this post.  :)

I was sorting through the photos here on the laptop, trying to decide what to write about since almost all of my posts are driven by the pictures ... and I thought you might be interested to see the story of how my Rose Field came to be. 

When we moved to this house in October 2007, the area where the Rose Field is now was a former vegetable garden, 80 by 160 feet (24 x 49 meters), and it was completely overgrown by blackberry brambles, honeysuckle, and every other manner of weed.  It required a lot to prepare the area for its next life as a rose garden.  We had to use a bushhog to mow down the thick brush to a manageable height, spray everything with herbicide, plow it ...

... disk it, till it, raise the individual rows, and let it all settle so the latent weeds would germinate.  After a final application of herbicide, and the prescribed waiting period, the ground was perfect!  (I hired the plowing, tilling, and sculpting part of this.  I'm a menace on the tractor and I avoid using it if at all possible.)

There are almost 300 roses planted in this garden, laid out in rows by class.  One Saturday in June 2008, my friend Robert came over to help me start planting.  We consulted my carefully-scribbled plan and laid out the pots of roses in their designated locations.  (See our neighbors' beautiful vineyard in the background?)

Robert dug holes, and I planted roses in them.

We got to about the point in the photo below, when my neighbor came over and offered to dig the holes for us ...

... with his tractor-mounted auger.  This made the work go SOOO much faster.  This auger dug a hole that exactly fit a one-gallon plant, and the backfill was all powdery and ready to put into the hole around the rose. 

By the end of the day, Robert and I had planted about half of the field.  By the end of the summer, I finished planting the rest of the roses myself. 

 By April of 2009, things were filling in quite nicely.

I hired a strong young man to line all the paths with crushed stone.  It took three dumptruck loads of stone to do the whole field ... all of which was hauled one wheelbarrow load at a time.

In this photo, you can see the tubing for the drip irrigation system that waters the roses.

After all the paths were finished, and the rows of roses covered with mulch, I was really pleased with the way this garden was coming together.

In the center of each row of roses is a pair of crossed rebar arches that form a tunnel down the center aisle of the garden.  The pipes you see are driven about two feet into the ground, and the arch is slipped down into the pipe. 

By late summer 2009, the roses didn't look so much like babies anymore.  At this point, we still had a few arches left to do.

In spring 2010, at the beginning of their third year in the ground, the roses were poised to put on a spectacular show.

I wish someone would invent a way for me to include the fragrance with these photos.

Looking at these photos, and remembering all the pleasure that I get from this garden, makes me wish even harder that spring were here.  Most mornings while the weather is warm, I can be found wandering the rows, coffee cup in hand, spending quality time with my roses.  This time of year, I stare longingly at them through the window from my warm house.

I can't wait to see what this year brings!

Now that you have seen the development of my garden, run over to see what others are sharing at Modern Country Style.  Thank you, Sarah, for hosting ... and for giving all of us such a lovely dose of summer.

In the Pink

Last fall, we began the process of turning the area underneath our pecan tree into a large shade garden.  The first step, and the only one we've completed to date, was to put in a mixed beds of hydrangeas, helebores, hostas, and the like, around our Tiki Hut. 

I propagated most of the hydrangeas we planted from ones I came across in my travels through cemeteries in the last year or two.  They went into the ground last fall as leafless twigs, and they're developing nicely so far this year.  The way they are blooming now speaks volumes about our soil here on the 'farm'.

They're PINK!  The flowers on this type of hydrangea are blue in acid soil and pink in alkaline.  I have never seen a hydrangea bloom pink in the garden of any of our former houses, nor in the gardens of friends.  The flowers on the plants the cuttings came from were blue-blue-blue, and now they're pink because of the soil pH in this spot.

I tested my soil before we planted anything on this property, expecting to have to amend heavily and lime to counteract the acid soil I am accustomed to in this part of the country.  To my surprise, I haven't found a pH reading below 6.0 anywhere on this property.  The pH beside these hydrangeas is 6.2!  High enough to turn them from their usual Virginia blue to a lovely shade of pink.

There are three other types of hydrangeas planted in these beds ... they all have white flowers.

Annabelle.

'Tokyo Delight' Lace Cap.

and Tardiva, which isn't blooming right now.

Our goal with these beds is to create a lush, tropical atmosphere.  Within a couple of years, the hydrangeas will get tall, the hostas will spread out, and the helebores should multiply and form little colonies. 

It's hard to tell from these photos that the beds are 6-feet deep.  Looking at it now, I can see that I'm going to have to enlarge them.  That's okay, we have lots of space ... it's the time that's going to be hard to manage.

(written by Hartwood Roses.  Hartwood Roses blog.)

Monday Musings ... on Tuesday.

Monday was one of those days where I felt overwhelmed by all the things I have to do.  The weight of it can get a bit stiffling, sometimes.  When I break it down and make a list, however, it's really not that bad.  In fact, I have accomplished quite a bit in a relatively short time.

Pruning is coming along pretty well.  The Hybrid Tea collection (80 roses) in the front yard is all finished.  This is their third year in the ground, so they got their first major spring pruning.  Until now, I had been less concerned with esthetics and more concerned with getting them established.  We'll see how it works out.

I took down the rebar tripods that held climbers along the Front Fence border.  It just didn't look right having pieces of rusty steel sticking up in a prominent spot in the front yard.  In its place, I strung three strands of wire along the fence for the roses.  It took a bit of a battle to prune them to shape (after letting them go vertical on the tripods) and get them against the fence and attached to the wire, but I'm really pleased with how they look now ... and they'll look even better next month.

This is Dr. W. Van Fleet, before his 'training'.

Here he is after ... trained to a fan shape, as horizontal as possible to encourage more flowers.

The pot ghetto survived winter pretty well.  There were only about half a dozen casualties among the 150+ roses banked along the fence.  Two of these are real disappointments.  I lost Elegance (a Brownell climber) and Emily Gray (a yellow rambler).  I expect that I'll have a bit of difficulty replacing these.

Voles killed Gertrude Jekyll.  They burrowed in through the drain holes in the bottom of the pot, and they ate every one of her roots.  If you've ever wondered what vole damage looks like, here's a rather extreme example.

It's pretty hard to imagine how many roses I have in pots, waiting for a spot in the garden.  To be honest, I don't have an exact number ... I know it's more than 200.  I haven't ordered any more roses for this year, so I hope to make some real progress on this.  I have such great plans.

I worked out the edging for the newest bed, on the south side of the house.  This spot needs some height, to mask where the old part of the house and the addition come together and to de-emphasize the garage door.  To do this, I'm going to send three yellow noisettes up the wall:  Reve d'Or, for sure, and probably Alister Stella Gray and Phil Edinger's Noisette ... maybe Marechal Niel.  Along with the roses, I'm planting peonies that we took from my husband's grandfather's house (and have moved with us from house to house ... 3 houses now), some rescued double daffodils, and probably some rescued iris.  This bed is bordered with Richmond cobblestones, which coordinate really nicely with our stone walls in front of the house.

The roses on the posts of the Arcade are all pruned and tied into place.  This is one of the few two-people jobs around here.  It takes one person (me) to prune the rose and gently wind it around the post, and another person (husband) to tie it in place with jute twine.  After only a year in the ground, Parade and Heidelberg have already almost reached the top of their posts!

This is a photo from last year, when the roses were smaller.

I have started pruning the roses in the Rose Field.  The climbers on the East Fence are all trimmed and reattached to their wires, and some of the ramblers on the North Fence are also finished.  Most of the old European roses (the Gallicas, Damasks, Hybrid Chinas, etc.) are done, too.  I pruned them down by 1/3 to 1/2, and I removed many of the suckers to control the size of their 'colonies'.  It should only take a few more days to have the rest of the shrubs in the Rose Field finished ... then I'll turn my attention to the climbers on the arches of the Rose Tunnel.

Mutabilis, before pruning. 

I was a bit distressed when I saw all this winter damage and dead canes.

Mutabilis, after pruning.

I cut out all the dead wood, and it looks much better than I thought it would. 

See the new basal canes?

The weeds are getting ahead of me.  Every year, I swear that I will finally win the battle ... and every year I fall behind as the weeds march across the rose beds.  They laugh at mulch and herbicide, and I struggle to keep up. 

I have to get serious about finishing my presentation for the Lynchburg Garden Symposium next month.  The outline is almost complete, so the rest of the program won't take any time at all.  The Lynchburg City Cemetery is such a special place, and I'm thrilled that they invited me to speak.

This time of year, it's easy to get dragged down by all the things I have to do.  I try to take time to reflect and appreciate what I have already done, and to be thankful that I have the ability to do it.

(written by Hartwood Roses.  Hartwood Roses blog)

The Rose Field Arches

This week, we finally installed the rest of the arches down the center aisle of the Rose Field, and all of their respective roses are off the ground and firmly attached!  This is a huge load off my mind.  The climbers have grown a whole lot more than I expected them to, and visitors have had to carefully tip-toe over some of them sprawling in the aisles.

I didn't take as many photos as I normally would.  I guess I was concentrating on the job at hand, instead of concentrating on documenting the process. 

This is my Before photo.  We had about half of the arches in place for months now, but the roses attached to them have grown pretty out of control.  You can see in the distance, the rows without arches and their roses on the ground.

Here's one rose after I gathered it up and tied it in place.  Every day I have to tie climbers, I thank my husband for buying me my handy taping tool.  (If you haven't seen the post where I show this wonderous invention, click HERE.)  The leaves look a bit awkward and cock-eyed right now, but they'll settle into place and turn toward the light and look right after a few days.

This is a view of the back of the arches, looking down the rows.  It's great to see the roses heading up their arches, instead of sprawling all over their neighbors.

After working all afternoon, here is the result. Doesn't this look fabulous?

Here's something slightly off topic, and puzzling.  Some sort of animal has been using one part of the Rose Field as a potty ... and I don't enough about poop identification to tell whether it's rabbit, or deer, or whatever.  None of the roses in this spot have been nibbled, either high or low, so there are no obvious clues available other than the poop itself.  Anyone know what did this?

(Mystery solved ... a kind reader has told me that this is rabbit poop.  Thanks, Darlene.)

(written by Hartwood Roses.  Hartwood Roses blog)