Flowers in the Greenhouse

I'm anxious to get out to the garden to photograph the few early roses that are blooming now ... but it's been really windy and the flowers don't stay still to be photographed.  Windy conditions are NOT a problem in the greenhouse.

Here are a few of the roses that are blooming in there as of this morning.

'Mike's Old Fashioned Pink'

(shrub)

'Cotton Candy'

(rambler)

'Green Ice'

(miniature)

'Pink Ribbon'

(miniature)

I used my finger for perspective to show you how small this flower is.

With some of the roses, these flowers they have now are the first ones I've seen ... and it's really exciting.

This is 'Double Blush Burnet'.  I identified this rose from photos sent by a reader.  She found it in the overgrown garden of her grandparents' homestead in Minnesota.  I am thrilled that she shared some suckers of it with me. 

This next rose has a similar story, but we don't know its identity.  It came to me from a rose friend in Montana, and she got it from an elderly neighbor named Hallie ... she calls it "Hallie's Rose".  It is a vigorous once-blooming rose that I will plant in the Labyrinth Garden, and I will think of Deb every time I see it.

I have no idea what this next rose is.  It's one I bought, but I don't remember where or when, and the writing on that tag is completely faded away.  One day I'll figure out what it is.  In the meantime, these flowers are beautiful, and they smell heavenly!

I don't know what these next two roses are either.  They have tags, but the tags are obviously wrong.

This is supposed to be 'Alice', a pink Polyantha.

... and this is supposed to be 'Shower of Gold', a yellow rambler.

I can't do anything about the first mis-tagged rose, because the nursery where I got it doesn't exist anymore ... and it's really rare and not available anywhere else.  I will contact the nursery where I got the second one and let them know about their mistake.  A reputable nursery will send the correct rose, no questions asked  ... I've had to do it for customers myself on two occasions that I can think of.

Walking the Dogs

When the weather is nice, I love to grab the leashes and take Daniel and Ruby for a walk around the property.  We have 9 acres, and access to Hartwood Winery's acreage next door, so the dogs and I can take a really nice walk in the country ... without leaving home.

On this particular day, there was a light breeze, and a beautiful blue sky with cottony white clouds.  Come along with us, and I will show you around.

In the corner of our pasture, we have an ancient apple tree.  I like to think that it's the last survivor of the orchard that I know was here in the 1890s.  (We have a copy of an advertisement from when our house was sold at auction at that time, and it specifically mentions an orchard.)  The tree bloomed better this year than it has in a while.

As I was looking at the apple tree, Ruby was distracted by something ... it was a pile of some sort of small animal poop.  Fortunately, I noticed what she was doing before she rolled in it.  (Remember last year when I found the bear poop?)

The ramblers on the back fence of the Rose Field are really big now ... too big, to be honest.  This year's early spring cut into my window of opportunity to prune these before they leafed out.  On the bright side ... there will be a whole lot more flowers on them like this ... I can't wait!

That's "Peggy Martin" in the foreground, and 'Erinnerung an Brod' farther down the fence.

This is my view from the back of our property toward Hartwood Winery's vineyard.  (There's something on my lens in these photos, and I didn't notice it until I was processing the photos for this post.)

The grape vines are all pruned and ready to grow and produce the grapes that will be this year's wine.  It was an early spring here, too, and the winery's crew of two raced to finish pruning as the vines broke bud and began to grow.

Here is the view of our barn from the vineyard.  The neighbors have the BEST view.

My back neighbors have a horse farm ... which is still for sale, if you or someone you know know wants a great horse operation.  As I stood at their fence talking to these two guys, I heard a low growl beside me.

It was Ruby ... hackles up, tail at attention, growling under her breath.  It's the first time I have heard her growl at anything!  I guess she doesn't care for horses.

While we are back here, let's head toward the barn.  See that little yellow building on the left?

It has the worst of the damage from last year's earthquake ... which, fortunately, isn't really all that bad.  I can fix it.

The two new gardens by the barn are still empty.  The Labyrinth is still staked out, awaiting paths and edging and plants.

The Miniature Garden is in the same condition ... but with the underlayment on the paths in place.

The English Garden is doing great!  These roses were planted a year and a half ago, and most of them are thriving.  A few are struggling, and I plan to replace them as soon as I can with others that I already have on hand.  That's what I was doing when I found the cannonball earlier this week ... right where the arrow is.

The weeds you see have already been shot with herbicide  and they're beginning to look a little sickly.

The bottle trees at the entrance to the English Garden didn't stand up to the winds this winter.  They're still firmly anchored in the ground, it's the metal 'trunk' that bent over like that.  Fortunately, none of the bottles broke.  I need to run next door, get some empty wine case boxes, and store the bottles until I can straighten and reinforce the trees.

The figs I planted on the south side of the barn are looking really good.  This bed is an experiment ... planted with eight different varieties to see which does best without irrigation or winter protection.  These two are thriving, but I don't know which ones they are because the tags are lost.

At this point, it was getting late and it was time to turn for home and give the dogs their dinner.  I don't think I've shown you this view of the back of our house before.  The green building is our detached garage ... the dormer is a storage attic.  The little white building to the left will eventually be a studio/workshop/I-would-love-to-put-an-antique-shop-in-there-one-day.  It's a dream to work toward.

As I predicted, the cool weather of the past few days has pretty much stopped the progression of bloom in the garden.  This is a good thing, because I don't want everything to be TOO early, and I'm definitely not at the point where I can open the nursery and garden to visitors quite yet.  It's getting close, though.

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I remembered that I have a photo of a 'view from space' of our property that I used in a post in 2010 (which was about burning the brush pile, which is why the brush pile is noted on the photo).  With a couple of modifications to highlight landmarks mentioned in this post, this should help you get your bearings.  Pretend the red property lines are straight.  :)

Digging Up Stuff

When you live in an old house, digging a hole can yield unexpected results.  I was up by the barn earlier this morning, working in the English Garden ... moving 'Abraham Darby' and planting a few other roses to fill in some of the blank spots.  As I was using my hands to break up the excavated soil to backfill Abe's new hole, I discovered that one of the clods of dirt was NOT dirt.

It's an iron ball ... about 3 inches in diameter.  It's solid, not hollow, and I doubt it contains explosives.  I don't have a scale, so I don't know exactly what it weighs. 

I'm going to find someone to ask, to see if maybe it's some sort of Civil War artifact.  Our property has been a farm since 1837, and our county was home to tens of thousands of Union soldiers each winter during the war.  The area where I was digging has seen lots of changes since then ... I was up by the barn, which probably built in the early 1900s.  If this thing is 150+ years old, I doubt it's been in the spot where I found it during all of that time.

I have errands to run this afternoon, and I plan to run by the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor's Center to ask one of their people about it.  I'll let you know what I find out.

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There's been a lot happening around here this month ... and I have been working hard on things, but not taking the time to document what I'm doing so I can blog about it.  (It gets me distracted and off track, I hope you understand.)  There are a few roses in the garden that are just beginning to bloom.  The seasonably-cool weather we're having has slowed things down, and I doubt bloom will progress much for the next week or so.  Whenever the wind dies down, I'll get out there with my camera and show them to you.

I'm planning for the upcoming rose season ... weeding, trimming, training, planting, and (as soon as I get some) mulching.  Parts of the garden look beautiful, other parts are still pretty horrible.  It is what it is, and I will make the best of it and do what I can.

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Here's the scoop .... I showed my find to the folks at the Visitor's Center.  They sent me across the street to the Civil War Store.  The guy who runs that place is an expert on relics, and I was assured that he could identify MY relic.  He looked it over, saw the mold mark (which I missed) and promptly proclaimed it to be a ball from a Colonial era 3-pounder ... probably Revolutionary War!!!  Their other store has an identical one on display, which was found here in Hartwood, too.  He said that there was a lot of 18th Century activity in my area.  (When confronted with a fascinating mystery like this, it certainly helps to live in a place with such a concentration of history experts.)

This ball is solid iron, so it's completely safe to handle ... as long as I don't drop it on my foot.  I want to thank those of you who saw this here and on FB, and called to make sure that I didn't do something stupid with it and blow myself up.  It's great to have such good friends.

White Wisteria

I know a place in Albemarle County, a little over an hour from here, where there is an old house with white wisteria naturalized over huge boxwood bushes and through the trees.

Yesterday, I took my mother with me as I went there (camera in hand) to show her this beautiful sight.

When Mom and I got out of the car, the fragrance of the wisteria was overpowering and wonderful ... as the scent wafted on the breeze around us. 

I wish the light had been a bit different, because it was very difficult to get a decent photo of the wisteria growing up the chimney and across the roof of the old house.  The sun was shining right in my face, and I had to shade the camera with my hand.  Perhaps I'll be out that way again, in the morning next time, to see if I can do better.

I may have had my rose rustling kit in the car with us, and a handful of cuttings of wisteria could have come home with me. I'm used to finding layered starts of wisteria in naturalized settings like this, but there were none in this case.  Wisteria roots pretty easily, so I hope to have wisteria babies to share later in the year.

I grew purple wisteria at our former house, and I loved it.  It was a small sucker that I dug from a naturalized stand of wisteria that no longer exists, and I planted it below my deck.  As it grew, I wove the vines basketweave-style through the deck railing.  Eventually, the wisteria woven that way destroyed the balusters of the railing ... but the vines were strong enough at that point to provide structural support, and THEY were the actual railing.  Sitting out there felt like being in a tree house.

As Mom and I were on our way home, the inside of my car smelled heavenly!

Saying Goodbye to a Wonderful Man

My husband and I made a fast trip to western North Carolina over the weekend.  His Uncle Rex passed away last week ... and we hurried out of here on Friday morning to get there to visit with family and attend his funeral on Saturday. 

left to right:  Uncle Rex, his wife Wanda, and my husband's father (who passed in 2009)

Our daughter who lives with us was working for two of the days we would be gone (12-hour shifts at the hospital).  She could take care of the cats, but I needed someone on short notice who could watch the dogs.  Our friends Kim and Andy stepped up to watch Daniel, and my mother volunteered to keep Ruby.  It was a huge relief to know that my dogs were so well cared for by people who love them. 

The funeral was truly a celebration of a wonderful man.  Uncle Rex was one of the smartest, kindest, most up-to-date 83-year-olds EVER.  He was this way because he never stopped trying new things and he loved to learn.  He once said, "There is not a person so smart that I cannot teach, nor person so dumb that I cannot learn from."  How profound.

I got very little sleep while we were there.  Both Friday and Saturday nights, we stayed up till almost midnight visiting with relatives that we rarely see.  Like most families, it takes a wedding or a funeral to rouse us from our routines and get us together.

Knowing I was going to be in her neck of the woods, I contacted Linda Loe of Long Ago Roses to see if she was available for a visit.  She and I have emailed occasionally for the past few years, and we have traded roses by mail, but we had never met each other in person until Sunday morning.  My husband and I arrived at her house, and I was instantly enchanted by her garden.  She has 300 roses planted in drifts, separated by winding paths, all throughout her large city lot.  Since it's so early in the season, there were only a few flowers ... but I could see that her garden will soon be filled with color and fragrance when the roses are blooming.

While I was at Linda's, you know that I HAD to buy some roses.  I made notes from her web site before I got to her house, and she suggested a few other roses for me that were not on my list ... for a total of nine new roses for my garden.  

There wasn't enough room in my Jeep for our luggage, two dogs, AND my roses, so I left them behind at my parents' house when we picked up Ruby. I will retrieve them later this week.  Let's see if I can remember which roses I bought, because the rose people who read this are going to want to know ... Annie Laurie, Harlekin, Teasing Georgia, Pretty Jessica, Nathalie's High Hills, Duke of York, Leonie Lamesch, Alchymist, and Rainbow.  (wow, I did it.)

This was Linda's neighbor's cat.  She was incredibly vocal, very affectionate, and hugely pregnant ... the cat, not Linda.

It's really good to be home now.  The Husband and I spent a LOT of time in the car over the past three days.  Ruby and Daniel were very glad to see us (as were the kitties) and it felt wonderful to sleep in my own bed last night.