Under The Rose
Feb. 1st, 2009 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaunthieThose of you who know me (or have been reading this blog for a while) know that I have roses in my front yard.
Erm. That might be a bit of an understatement, actually.
I have a fence around my front yard, along which I planted a number of rose bushes, partially to assuage my guilt at having to rip out the old rose garden bed in the back of the house (two different rose viruses and years of neglect left it more or less DOA when I moved in, but still), and partially because I like the natural barbed-wire-defenses-but-pretty-and-useful aspects of rose bushes on a fence. I planted nine, to be precise: a Red New Dawn, a rugosa, a mystery rose that was supposed to be a Fourth of July but definitely wasn't, a New Dawn, an Eddie's Jewels, a Darlow's Enigma, an Autumn Sunset, a Galway Bay, and a Dublin Bay. Many of these are climbing roses. Two of these were gifts (the rugosa and the Eddie's Jewels); the others were ones I chose for their climbing habit, alleged disease resistance, and rated fragrance level. I like roses that smell like roses, and that can take care of themselves with minimal fuss required on my part.
Seven of the roses have done very well for themselves. The Galway Bay has never done much, and it's possible this winter will have killed it off entirely, and I won't miss it. The mystery rose was prone to blackspot and legginess, and wasn't really a climber, and didn't produce tons of blooms...but oh, the fragrance of those blooms! INSANE amounts of true rose fragrance that you could smell from a block away. I started timing making my batches of rose jam around when it and the Red New Dawn (also insane fragrance, and a massively prolific bloomer in its first, month-plus bloom phase, after which it only sporadically reblooms) were in their best blooming phases. They are the backbone and staple of my rose jam. (To which I have added yet another convert: my PT guru J, who like me doesn't even LIKE jam usually, but told me he adores the rose jam I gave him in December, and has just about finished off the jar already. Yay rose jam!)
Or were. The battle between the enormous Eddie and the massive Darlow, combined with a freak windstorm, took down a large section of my fence last year. (Click the link for pictures.) We had to replace the entire fence, which we and a bunch of our friends (none of whom had actually ever built a fence) had built as a grand birthday present for me. We hired someone to do it professionally this time, and it has been rebuilt bigger, stronger, and much more massive. It looks fabulous, and the new-and-improved fence should stand up to any amount of rose-bush and windstorm abuse for years and years to come.
But unfortunately, my mystery rose was a casualty of the fence-building project. The builder cut it down to nothing, and put a post hole more or less where it had been, and I think it's dead, Jim, very dead. I have some seeds from it that I collected, but roses being what they are, there's no guarantee that any of the seeds would produce roses that were anything like its parent, and I don't really have the garden space to experiment with them. So if I want to have similar roses available to me, I'll have to buy a new one, plant it, and wait a few years. Which task is made more difficult because I never knew what it was.
I did invest some time over the years trying to identify my mystery rose. I took a trip to the display gardens of the nursery I bought it from, as well as our city rose garden. I re-read the catalog from the year I ordered it. I did a lot of poking around online. Based on its characteristics, I'm fairly sure it was a Bourbon rose, and from its color and characteristics (and availability in that year's catalog), I tentatively identified it as a Souvenir de President Lincoln. Which just so happens to be one of the more obscure Bourbons, and is no longer available from the grower I got it from originally. Argh. So much for that idea.
I debated with myself whether I really needed to replace it at all. I have quite a lot of roses, I reminded myself. But given that it really was one of the roses that I used heavily in my rose jam, I eventually decided that yes, I really should try to replace it with something as similar as possible to my lost mystery rose. So I went shopping and picked out a Mme. Issac Periere, a not-at-all-obscure Bourbon with allegedly fantastic perfume and a good, hardy growing habit (for a Bourbon). And me being me, I couldn't help but notice that there was a rose sale going on, and somehow a William Shakespeare wound up in my basket. Hey, it's (allegedly) a very fragrant constantly-reblooming deep red rose, and my one really-red reblooming rose (the Dublin Bay) doesn't have any fragrance to speak of. I really want a red rose that smells like a rose available all summer long, not just when the Red New Dawn is producing. So I need it, don't I?
Sigh.
The two new roses are scheduled to arrive in mid-April, by which time I will have cleared out space for them. (I hope.)
So, rose shopping done, right?
Um. Well. It turns out that while my usual "let's buy a rose" vendor does not carry Lincoln anymore, another kind-of-local nursery does. In gallon pots on their own roots, no less. AND they claim that their Lincoln is highly disease resistant, which means either they've done some serious selective breeding to encourage resistance to blackspot, or their nursery isn't in an area prone to it (unlikely), or they're fibbing. But still. Temptation central!
I haven't ordered it. I don't really have room in my yard for THREE new roses. (Yet.) But oh dear...
Erm. That might be a bit of an understatement, actually.
I have a fence around my front yard, along which I planted a number of rose bushes, partially to assuage my guilt at having to rip out the old rose garden bed in the back of the house (two different rose viruses and years of neglect left it more or less DOA when I moved in, but still), and partially because I like the natural barbed-wire-defenses-but-pretty-and-useful aspects of rose bushes on a fence. I planted nine, to be precise: a Red New Dawn, a rugosa, a mystery rose that was supposed to be a Fourth of July but definitely wasn't, a New Dawn, an Eddie's Jewels, a Darlow's Enigma, an Autumn Sunset, a Galway Bay, and a Dublin Bay. Many of these are climbing roses. Two of these were gifts (the rugosa and the Eddie's Jewels); the others were ones I chose for their climbing habit, alleged disease resistance, and rated fragrance level. I like roses that smell like roses, and that can take care of themselves with minimal fuss required on my part.
Seven of the roses have done very well for themselves. The Galway Bay has never done much, and it's possible this winter will have killed it off entirely, and I won't miss it. The mystery rose was prone to blackspot and legginess, and wasn't really a climber, and didn't produce tons of blooms...but oh, the fragrance of those blooms! INSANE amounts of true rose fragrance that you could smell from a block away. I started timing making my batches of rose jam around when it and the Red New Dawn (also insane fragrance, and a massively prolific bloomer in its first, month-plus bloom phase, after which it only sporadically reblooms) were in their best blooming phases. They are the backbone and staple of my rose jam. (To which I have added yet another convert: my PT guru J, who like me doesn't even LIKE jam usually, but told me he adores the rose jam I gave him in December, and has just about finished off the jar already. Yay rose jam!)
Or were. The battle between the enormous Eddie and the massive Darlow, combined with a freak windstorm, took down a large section of my fence last year. (Click the link for pictures.) We had to replace the entire fence, which we and a bunch of our friends (none of whom had actually ever built a fence) had built as a grand birthday present for me. We hired someone to do it professionally this time, and it has been rebuilt bigger, stronger, and much more massive. It looks fabulous, and the new-and-improved fence should stand up to any amount of rose-bush and windstorm abuse for years and years to come.
But unfortunately, my mystery rose was a casualty of the fence-building project. The builder cut it down to nothing, and put a post hole more or less where it had been, and I think it's dead, Jim, very dead. I have some seeds from it that I collected, but roses being what they are, there's no guarantee that any of the seeds would produce roses that were anything like its parent, and I don't really have the garden space to experiment with them. So if I want to have similar roses available to me, I'll have to buy a new one, plant it, and wait a few years. Which task is made more difficult because I never knew what it was.
I did invest some time over the years trying to identify my mystery rose. I took a trip to the display gardens of the nursery I bought it from, as well as our city rose garden. I re-read the catalog from the year I ordered it. I did a lot of poking around online. Based on its characteristics, I'm fairly sure it was a Bourbon rose, and from its color and characteristics (and availability in that year's catalog), I tentatively identified it as a Souvenir de President Lincoln. Which just so happens to be one of the more obscure Bourbons, and is no longer available from the grower I got it from originally. Argh. So much for that idea.
I debated with myself whether I really needed to replace it at all. I have quite a lot of roses, I reminded myself. But given that it really was one of the roses that I used heavily in my rose jam, I eventually decided that yes, I really should try to replace it with something as similar as possible to my lost mystery rose. So I went shopping and picked out a Mme. Issac Periere, a not-at-all-obscure Bourbon with allegedly fantastic perfume and a good, hardy growing habit (for a Bourbon). And me being me, I couldn't help but notice that there was a rose sale going on, and somehow a William Shakespeare wound up in my basket. Hey, it's (allegedly) a very fragrant constantly-reblooming deep red rose, and my one really-red reblooming rose (the Dublin Bay) doesn't have any fragrance to speak of. I really want a red rose that smells like a rose available all summer long, not just when the Red New Dawn is producing. So I need it, don't I?
Sigh.
The two new roses are scheduled to arrive in mid-April, by which time I will have cleared out space for them. (I hope.)
So, rose shopping done, right?
Um. Well. It turns out that while my usual "let's buy a rose" vendor does not carry Lincoln anymore, another kind-of-local nursery does. In gallon pots on their own roots, no less. AND they claim that their Lincoln is highly disease resistant, which means either they've done some serious selective breeding to encourage resistance to blackspot, or their nursery isn't in an area prone to it (unlikely), or they're fibbing. But still. Temptation central!
I haven't ordered it. I don't really have room in my yard for THREE new roses. (Yet.) But oh dear...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 06:11 am (UTC)Thank you for the luck wishing. I've stayed steadfast so far...
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 06:20 am (UTC)Keep up the resisting temptation.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-02 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 06:11 am (UTC)