Planting a Rose

There are all sorts of complicated methods that some folks will tell you must be followed in order to correctly plant a rose.  Complicated is not what I do around here ... but you already know that.  Most of the roses I plant are small, usually one-year-old own-root plants growing in half-gallon or one-gallon pots.  

The subject of today's demonstration is a plant that I rooted from cuttings of a rose in the Historic Sacramento City Cemetery, thought to have been brought to California from Virginia.  I call it "Unknown China from Virginia".  Whatever it is, with its Virginia connection, I asked and was given permission to take cuttings, in order to take this rose back 'home'.

I planted this rose in the expanded section of my Rambler Garden, along with nine other roses that had lived in their little pots for WAY too long.  This is what I did:

1.  Marked the location, and swept back the existing mulch to expose the landscape fabric liner on this garden.

2.  Cut a good-sized hole in the liner.  For this rose, the diameter of the hole is three-times the width of the pot.

3.  Dig a hole the same depth as the pot and twice as wide, carefully tip the rose out of its pot, place it in the hole and put the soil back into the hole around it.

4.  Weeds are such an awful problem for me.  To help suppress them, I cover the opening in the landscape fabric with a good layer of newspaper, tucked underneath the landscape fabric.

5.  Carefully put the mulch back around the new plant, covering the newspaper without piling it around the stem.

6.  For little guys like this, I add a cage of hardware cloth or chicken wire so the rabbits can't get to it.  I will remove the cage once the rose is a little bigger and no longer in danger of being eaten to the ground.

That's it!  A ten-minute job, at the most.  It takes a little bit longer if I have to dig a bigger hole to accommodate a larger plant, but it's still not a huge ordeal.  All that's left to do for this rose is to make sure that I keep it adequately watered.

(I can't wait to show you this little guy later this spring, as he gets bigger and fills in the space!  As soon as he produces a flower, you will be the first ones to know.)

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Want to learn how to root your own roses from cuttings?  This is the method that I use.
Hartwood Roses:  How to Root Roses from Cuttings

Weekend Snapshots

1.  Spring has truly arrived, and more and more flowers appear in the garden every day.  I am thankful to have my iPhone in my pocket most of the time to capture the images as I see them.

'Pink Perfection' is the only spring-flowering camellia that I have.  I prefer the fall/winter flowering sasanqua varieties ... they're a bit more predictable and less susceptible to unpredictable spring weather.  

Pink Perfection looked to be poised for a spectacular number of flowers, till Friday's gale-force winds knocked off most of the big, fat buds.  There they are, on the ground.  :(

 The Dogwood tree at the center of my Hybrid Tea Garden in the front yard is just beginning to open its flowers.  It's going to be spectacular by the middle of next week. 

I saw the single-flowered form of Kerria japonica at a garden on tour last spring.  Mentioned it to a friend, who happened to have a plant that she wasn't going to use.  It is now growing on the shady west end of one of my front yard rose borders.  (This flower is about the size of a quarter.)

As I was weeding and pruning last week, I noticed this tiny, perfect bud on 'Dr. E. M. Mills".  This bud, and many others that have also formed already throughout the garden, hold the promise of a spectacular rose season to come ... in about eight weeks!

2.  Mrs. Wren is now sitting on her eggs in the flowerpot nest in my greenhouse.  I think she has five eggs.  I noticed her camped on the nest, when I carefully peeked at it on Friday afternoon.  A quick Google search told me that wrens incubate their eggs for 12-16 days.  In two weeks, give or take a day or two, the babies should hatch.

3.  Winnie likes to think of herself as a guard dog.  She watches for 'intruders' and then she barks and growls to sound as fierce as she can.  In this case, it was our daughter coming home this morning from working an overnight shift.  As you can see, Ruby trusts that Winnie has the situation handled.

4.  Today is chilly and windy ... a stark contrast to the warm weather that we had here for the past few days.  My husband had planned to work outside today, and that's exactly what he did ... cutting and securing timbers between the fence posts to form the back border of the Rambler Fence.  He deals better with cold and wind than I do.

Ruby is in her window, watching the progress.

5.  I have been keeping myself occupied inside today, where it's warm, making big pots of soup for dinner tonight and to restock the freezer with quick, healthy weeknight dinners for the next few weeks.  

Cauliflower Potato soup, as seen before I whirled it smooth with the hand blender.

Recipe is HERE.

Black Bean and Pumpkin soup is ugly but incredibly yummy and LOADED with fiber and other good-for-you stuff!

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Black Bean Pumpkin Soup

32 ounces chicken broth

3 cans 15-1/2 ounce cans of black beans (rinsed and roughly pureed in blender with some of the chicken broth)

1 16-ounce can of pumpkin puree

1 can tomatoes w/ chilis (like Rotel original)

1-1/2 cup finely chopped onion

4 finely chopped cloves of garlic (or 1/2 tsp garlic powder)

1 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1 rounded tablespoon ground Cumin

6-8 strips cooked bacon, finely chopped.

I dump all the ingredients into my favorite soup pot, and simmer gently for about half an hour.  Serve as is, or add a sprinkling of grated cheese and/or a blob of sour cream.

... 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.

What I Did Last Week

According to the calendar, spring is near.  Weather-wise last week, spring was very evident ... temperatures far above average, with light breezes, some cloudy days and some sunny days.  You will not be surprised when I tell you that I spent a good part of the week doing things outdoors.

1.  At this time of year, my main focus is on my responsibilities as the manager of the rose collection at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.  (Our rose volunteer day is March 19, six days from today.)  In February and early March, I use whatever nice days we have to go to the cemetery to visit all of the roses to assess their condition and to note make notes about what work they need.  As of now, all of the roses have been evaluated, and their location is verified on the cemetery map.  All that's left to do is to type up my notes and turn them into instructions for each volunteer team next Saturday.

Dorothy was helping me work on the map.

2.  Last weekend, I attended the American Rose Society Colonial District Pre-Spring Meeting.  I love having the opportunity to get away to be with my rose peeps, to listen and learn at the presentations, and to catch up with friends.  During one of the breaks, I was approached by the District Director and asked if he could appoint me to be the Old Garden Rose Chair for the District.  I agreed ... the appointment was made ... and now we'll see exactly what this position entails.  I'm pretty excited about it.

3.  On the way home from the rose meeting, I stopped by one of my favorite stores, Old Covesville Store on Route 29 south of Charlottesville.  There are always amazing and wonderful things in there for sale.  On this trip, I spotted a large Steiff tiger that is similar to a smaller one that I had when I was a child.  No hesitation ... I scooped that tiger up and happily brought him home with me.

Here he was in the store.

and on the seat of my car.

4.  I have known for a while that the windows of my greenhouse needed some work.  The glazing compound in most of them is dry and cracked, and largely missing on some of the windows.  (This can be the downside of using salvaged windows for a project.)  This winter, as some of the window panes began to fall out, I knew that the job of reglazing the windows needed to be pushed to the top of my list.  Turns out, when these windows were made in the 1960s, the manufacturer only used glazing compound to hold in the glass ... without glazing points to mechanically pin the panes into place.  

The only way to finish a project is to get started, and I did just that on Wednesday.  It takes me about an hour to do one window ... to scrape out the old glazing compound, reset the glass, and put down the new glazing compound.  This is a project that I will work on a little at a time.  Hopefully, by the end of summer, I will have most of the 46 windows done.  (My REAL dream is to finally have the greenhouse glazed, sided and trimmed, and painted by fall.)

Not perfect, but good enough.  I will scrape and prime the windows once the glazing compound cures.

I saw this reflection as I was working.

5.  My other outside project is the reclamation of the Rambler Fence.  It's the same situation as the rest of my gardens, where weeds sprouted in unnatural concentrations and took over in what seemed like the blink of an eye.  With the Ramblers, there was the added complication of their rampant growth ... and they became hay stacks on the fence while my attention was elsewhere for the past couple of years.

Little by little, I have been cutting back the Ramblers and training what remains onto their wires on the fence.  They are small and kind of pitiful right now.  I have also dug out a couple of duplicate Ramblers, and one that had Rose Rosette Disease last year, and replaced them with ones from my stock pile of pots.

When I originally designed this garden in 2007, I planted Tea roses between and in front of the Ramblers.  Some Tea roses can be a bit winter tender ... the winters of 2013 and 2014 were brutal and losses to these roses were catastrophic.  Instead of lamenting their loss, I see this as an opportunity and space to plant eight new roses in the empty spots.

Ramblers cut back, dead Tea roses dug up, and the beginnings of landscape fabric laid in this part of the garden.

Yesterday, I finished the landscape fabric and laid mulch around the roses themselves.  I have to get more mulch in order to finish ... which should happen over the course of the next week.

6.  With nice weather comes convertible season!  I was out in my Mustang twice last week, practicing with its new stick shift.  I'm getting much better at it ... and I almost don't panic if I have to stop and then pull out on an incline.

I have been using the uphill part of our long driveway to practice.

All in all, it was a VERY good week.  How about you ... what have you been up to?

Hartwood Roses Virtual Open Garden Day Tour

I open my rose garden to the public for drop-in visits on one day in the spring.  Open Garden for this year was last Sunday, June 7.  My goal is to try to schedule this date to coincide with overwhelming full bloom ... haven't nailed this quite yet, but there is still always a LOT to see ... no matter if the date is too early or too late.  This year, it was about a week late.  

There is so much here to experience that, years ago, we decided that it would be helpful for visitors to have a map of the property and gardens.  My talented artist husband sketched this one afternoon, and we update it whenever something changes.

Let's follow the map's legend and take a long, leisurely tour of the property, structures, and gardens at Hartwood Manor ... emphasis on the "long" part of this tour, because this is a long post.  Garden photos in this post were taken this morning, June 12, 2015.  The roses, in general, are mostly past peak and flowers have dried up in our summer heat from the past few days.  There is still a lot to look at, though, as you will see.


1.  Front Fence Border.
This was the first rose garden at Hartwood Roses, designed and planted in 2007.  This area was formerly a huge overgrown feral Forsythia hedge.  It contains a collection of Noisette, Hybrid Perpetual, Bourbon, Hybrid Musk, China, and Tea roses.  This garden was renovated in 2015, to make space for roses from the Leonie Bell collection at Tufton Farm.

'Dr. W. Van Fleet', planted so that it's the first rose I see every time I pull into the driveway.

No flowers left on 'Moonlight' and 'Shailer's Provence' ... a beautiful combination two weeks ago.

Tiny new plant of "Single Pink China" from the Tufton Collection is continuing to grow and flower.

Newly planted "Cemetery Musk Seedling" is doing great.

2.  Hybrid Tea Garden.
Four geometric garden beds, cut into the turf and edged in brick, in the style of an early formal rose garden.  This garden contains an assortment of 80 Hybrid Tea and Floribunda roses, mostly from the late 19th and early 20th century.

North side of the Hybrid Tea Garden.

Beautiful fiery orange bud on 'Maria Stern'

Second flush of bloom on 'Poulsen's Pearl'

I have yet to accurately capture Hadley's deep magenta red.

'Peace' was one of my grandmother's favorite roses.

3.  Van Fleet Fence.
This garden along one side of the concrete cannonball fence beside our circular driveway is planted with once-blooming Hybrid Wichurana ramblers developed in the early 20th century by my favorite hybridizer, Dr. Walter Van Fleet of Beltsville, Maryland. 

The star of this area was 'Glenn Dale', attracting attention for his beautiful form and foliage ... even without any flowers.

4.  Hartwood Manor.
A brick Gothic-Revival farmhouse.  The original portion of the house dates from 1848, with a major addition that was added in 1967.  We have owned the property since 2002.

Unstaged photo from this morning.  Our family loves our Jeeps!

5.  Greenhouse.
Built in 2010, the greenhouse and its lean-to addition were designed to make use of salvaged and reclaimed materials.  Windows from two 1960s houses, skylights from a builder liquidation, timbers from a dismantled retaining wall, cast iron columns, and other materials were collected over the years.

6.  The Shack.
This little building was used as a workshop and for storage by previous owners.  We are renovating it to eventually be used as a studio.

7.  Detached Carriage-House Garage.
Designed and built in 2005, the garage is sited in the exact location of a 20th century equipment shed/goat barn that was deteriorated beyond repair.

8.  The Arcade.
A large pergola, nine feet tall and 54 feet long, planted with ten repeat-flowering climbers, trained in a pillar style.

Most people who were here on Sunday took their picture in front of 'White Cap'

These flowers were damaged by the heat yesterday, but the color of 'Pink Pillar' is still amazing.

9.  The Rambler Fence.
The roses planted in this garden are Hybrid Wichurana ramblers introduced by Barbier and Company and other hybridizers in France in the early 20th century.  Tea roses are planted to fill in the space in front of the ramblers.

The Rambler Fence is in desperate need of a makeover.  Doesn't stop 'Ghislaine de Feligonde' from continuing to pump out its beautiful, delicate flowers.

10.  The Rose Field.
Three hundred roses were originally planted in this garden in 2008, which is 150 feet long and 75 feet wide, with gravel paths between the planting beds and steel arches over a central aisle.  A little bit of neglect a few years ago allowed weeds to get a foothold, and now this garden needs a major overhaul.  [even in its heinous state, there is beauty along the accessible edges of the Rose Field.]

"Arcata Pink Globe" taking over this corner of the fence.

Mostly finished blooming for this year, though there were still a few flowers to admire.

Unidentified blue Clematis, making a great contrast against the rustic board fence.

"Peggy Martin" draped on the fence, flowering her little brains out.

11.  The Cottage.
Mid-20th century concrete block building that has been used as a milk house, pump house, and a tack shed.  We use it for storage.

Oil painting of our barn, the cottage, and rose gardens, by our friend Ed King.

12.  The Barn.
Probably built in the early 20th century as a dairy and cattle barn.  Brought back from the brink of ruin and restored in 2007.  [There is a link on the sidebar to a very long post that I published a few years ago, that details the barn's damaged condition and work that was necessary to restore it.]

13.  English Garden.
This garden contains a growing collection of found Noisette roses and about thirty David Austin English roses.

'Morning Mist' was one of the stars of Open Garden.

Early in the morning, when this photo was taken, flowers were just starting to reopen for the day.

found Noisette rose, probably the pollen parent for my "Lilian Austin Noisette Seedling"

"Seedling" has another big bud, which will probably open next week.

'Queen Nefertiti' is a little known David Austin rose that performs very well in my garden.

My other seedling, from an open-pollinated hip on 'Peace' is a beautiful thing!

14.  Miniature Garden.
The newest garden on the property, designed in 2013, is eleven feet wide and 150 feet long.  Contains a collection of over one hundred historic miniature roses, miniature China roses, miniature climbing roses, and classic Floribunda, Hybrid Tea, and Shrub roses.  Once-blooming large-flowered rambler roses are trained to wire on the fence.

These flowers on 'Paul Ecke, Jr.' are a bit past peak, but they are still a great representation of this rose's insane burnt red color.

You already know how much I love singles ... I love single Hybrid Tea roses most of all!

Red miniature 'My Valentine' never seems to be without flowers.

The deep color of 'Black Ice' is a beacon in the garden.

15.  Nursery Sales Area.
The driveway beside the house is the current home of the roses for sale (as available).

Roses for sale during Open Garden were arranged on a makeshift bench in the shady driveway.

"Hanover Excelsa" is still pumping out the flowers.

16.  Pavilion.
Surrounded by shade garden plants, including hosta, hellebore, hydrangea, Solomon Seal, and Japanese maple.

Refreshments during Open Garden were set up in the Pavilion, where visitors sat and enjoyed the breezes and the view.

Open Garden on Sunday was VERY well attended.  The first car-full of visitors arrived at the stroke of 10:00 when we opened, and traffic was steady all day.  We had printed out 50 walking tour maps, giving one to each group/carload of people, and had only 20 maps left when we closed at 3:00.  I tried to talk to everyone that I could, answering questions and showing people around.  My husband handled parking, and gave out maps and instructions.

Some of the visitors were friends and other people I know, but most were strangers who found out about the event somehow.  (I had it listed here and on the Hartwood Roses Facebook page.  The local tourism folks picked it up and put it on their site and in their monthly email blast, and the newspaper picked it up from somewhere.)  All of the visitors that my husband and I talked to were happy to be here, couldn't believe that this is our private house and that we open the garden like we do ... and a few were amazed that we don't charge admission.

My philosophy is simple.  I garden because it makes me happy.  I open my garden to visitors because I want to share it with others to make THEM happy.  On Sunday, we had families with children, families with grandparents, young couples, singles, and every other assortment of groups come through here.  Some were surprised to be treated so hospitably ... hey, it's the only way that I know how to do things, Folks.

A garden club friend of mine, who had never visited here before, paid me the ultimate compliment without knowing it.  He said, "I always thought that rose growers are an obsessive sort, but you're not like that at all."  

Thanks, Ed ... I'm glad you noticed.