Rose Gardening Season by Season

Hot off the presses! Our second book, Rose Gardening Season by Season: A Journal for Passionate Gardeners, (Forbes River Publishing, 2015) is now available for sale on our web site: www.rosesolutions.net

This Journal, customized for gardeners, provides pages where you can record the season by season performance of your garden. On each Journal page you’ll find rose gardening tips, anecdotes and advice. Plus each season has a To-Do List so you’ll know the right time to plant, prune and feed roses. We’ve also included pages where you can keep track of all the important information about each rose in your garden – type, color, growth habit, date planted and date of first bloom.

There are pages to keep track of the seasonal highlights – all those things that you may not remember from one season to the next. There are pages to evaluate the performance of your roses and companion plants plus pages to keep notes on which varieties and companion plants to keep, to replace and to buy.

Want to know what roses are fragrant? We provide a list of fragrant varieties that not only identifies the rose, but includes its type, color and hardiness zone. We do the same with a list for shade tolerant roses. And there are more lists that include companion plants, sources for mail order roses and supplies as well as a list of our personal favorite varieties.

Since we love taking photographs of our roses, we feature over 30 full-color rose photos – from the stylish Sexy Rexy on the cover to the beautiful pink Earth Song (a favorite) in the introduction as well as a display of Brownell roses in the Roses in My Garden page.

If you like to “journal” and love to garden, check-out Rose Gardening Season by Season: A Journal for Passionate Gardeners. You can chronicle an entire season of rose gardening in one practical, informative and attractive journal that will serve as a unique account of your garden as well as a blueprint for the following year.

Four New David Austin Roses for 2015

The Lady Gardener

If you love fragrant, old-fashioned roses that bloom all season, you may want to consider some of the new introductions from David Austin Roses that will be available to American gardeners this spring. Last year when Mike and I were looking for white roses, we planted Tranquillity, an Austin 2014 US introduction. Since our color taste is moving toward more vibrant colors, especially apricots and peaches, we’re considering adding Austin’s The Lady Gardener with her fragrant blooms of pure apricot.

The Lady Gardener

The Lady Gardener has an intense tea fragrance and is on Austin’s list of Most Fragrant English Roses. The rich apricot blooms produced are large – about 4 “across – and its numerous petals form a rosette flower that appears quartered. It reblooms throughout the season and is ideal for smaller gardens since it has a small habit of about 3½ feet tall and 2½ feet wide. The Lady Gardener will be a great addition to our collection of other apricot and peach colored roses.

Other 2015 North American introductions include:

Maid Marion

Maid Marion is very fragrant with blooms packed with clear rose pink petals. The flower opens as cup-shaped but when fully open, displays outer paler pink petals that frame the inner darker pink petals in a circular, saucer shape. It has an upright habit, grows to about 3 ft tall and 3 ft wide and provides repeat blooms from spring to fall. This rose is named for the character Maid Marion, made famous in the legend of Robin Hood.

Thomas a Becket

Thomas à Becket has large red flowers with old rose fragrance and a natural and shrub-like growth. Its shallow-cupped blooms display petals from light red to carmine and have a nodding habit that’s typical of many Austin varieties. It can reach a height of 4 ft tall or more and 3 ft. across depending on how it is pruned. David Austin Roses named this rose on behalf of Canterbury Cathedral.

Thomas a Becker

The Albrighton Rambler has small, soft pink flowers with a button eye that bloom in large sprays. It has the potential to grow as tall as 10 to 12 feet or more. While many ramblers bloom only once per season, The Albrighton Rambler will repeat all season. This rose, according to David Austin Roses was “named to commend the Striders, Steppers and Strollers who walk around the village of Albrighton, where our Nursery is located.”

The Albrighton Rambler

You can find these roses at David Austin Roses’ web site at http://www.davidaustinroses.com or ask for them at your local nursery or garden center.

All Photos: David Austin Roses

Sunflowers and Snow Flakes

What’s with sunflowers?
I see them widely planted and yet had never been tempted to try them myself. But that changed last spring when Angelina and I were presented with a unique opportunity. Due to the removal of a large maple tree because of hurricane damage the previous year, we created a border in a now-sunny location along our new deer fence. Since we had no clear vision at the time of what this border should be and did not want to waste a growing season by doing nothing, we settled on an eclectic mix of garlic, eggplant, tomatoes, string beans and sunflowers.

 

Side Garden in August

Side Garden after Blizzard

We both wanted the vegetables and Angelina lobbied to include sunflowers. Even though it was getting late in the spring to plant seeds, I bought two packets of leftover sunflower seeds for $1 each at a local discount store and planted them in late May, having no idea what to expect. Would they be fussy, high maintenance plants? Tough to grow? Attract unwanted animals?

 

Well, no worries. I planted one long row along the fence by poking my index finger into soft soil and dropping a seed in, covered it up and watered. That’s it. A week later these tiny seedlings appeared and started to grow…and grow…and grow… They grew as tall as the six-foot deer fence and then grew another six feet. Our neighbors enjoyed them as much as we did. By late July they started to bloom into an eye-popping blast of bright yellow that continued into the early fall.
While the tomatoes, eggplant and garlic grew superbly and the string beans never quit, the stars of the garden were the towering, frisbee-sized flower heads. What had started off as a diverse assortment of miscellaneous plants melded together by mid-summer into an unusual yet attractive garden that we could never have planned.
As I sit here writing in January, the Blizzard of 2015, as it is now called, howls outside. But as snow drifts across the driveway and the temperature sinks towards zero and the news media predicts winter doom, I think of those great golden sunflowers from last summer smiling at me.

 
If, as Angelina likes to say, gardening begins in January with your imagination, then it also continues through warm reflections of gardens past.

2015 Lecture Series

Rainbow Sorbet
One of Our Twenty-Five Fabulous Roses

No one is more optimistic than a gardener in January. The new year brings high hopes and great expectations for the coming year. Our 2015 agenda includes a major rose garden remodeling project; a trip to Seattle, Vancouver and the Canadian Rockies; the publication of our second book; and our 2015 Lecture Series.
We have accepted a number of invitations to present lectures and workshops. Our entertaining lectures, workshops and seminars are designed to educate and make rose gardening appealing to even the most reluctant gardener. We especially enjoy these opportunities to travel throughout the New England area and beyond, making new friends and catching up with old pals that we often only see once each year. (See the complete list of 2015 programs, dates, and times on the 2015 Lecture Series page.)
Along with the lecture series, we are busy planning a trip to Seattle, Vancouver and the Canadian Rockies later this year and we recently completed work on our second book, Rose Gardening Season by Season: A Journal for Passionate Gardeners. This seasonal guide joins Roses for New England: A Guide to Sustainable Rose Gardening and we will have both available at our lectures and workshops.
The season opener is Saturday, February 14 when we participate, with others, in the Rhode Island Rose Society’s annual Round Table, a forum of basic rose care that provides an opportunity to learn a great deal about rose culture in a short period of time. This event is free and open to the public.
We return to the Rhode Island Spring Flower and Garden Show on Saturday, February 21 and the Boston Flower and Garden Show on Friday, March 13. We will introduce a new PowerPoint program at both shows called “Twenty-Five Fabulous Roses” where we feature the best 25 rose varieties we have ever grown – newer introductions as well as old favorites. The challenge was culling the list to just twenty-five. Rainbow Sorbet, pictured above, is on the list.

 

As everyone’s gardening spirit continues to rise, we offer the season’s first workshop, Spring Rose-Care: Planting and Pruning Workshop, on Saturday, March 21 in Barrington, RI in concert with the Barrington Community School. This continues our long-time collaboration with BCS presenting lectures and workshops on a wide range of rose horticulture.
We hit the road on March 28 traveling to Holyoke, MA to present an expanded version of our most popular program, “Six Simple Steps to Successful Rose Gardening,” at the Western Mass Master Gardener Association Spring Garden Symposium. We lengthened the presentation to include more details and to allow additional time for Q and A.
On Saturday May 2, we present our second workshop at Evergreen Tree and Landscape in Seekonk, MA. This two-hour program, called “Roses 101: The Best Way to Grow Roses,” covers everything you need to know to successfully grow roses in your home garden.
Saturday, August 1 is our annual rose propagation workshop where we teach the art of bud grafting roses. This year we are partnering with the Barrington Community School to present this two-hour program. Bud grafting is easier than you think and everyone takes a budded rose bush home.
In between all this, our schedule is full of garden club bookings along with presentations to various horticultural organizations. We are available to speak at symposiums and conventions and are willing to go just about anywhere. We can customize programs and in the past have developed special one-of-a-kind seminars.
Keep checking the Lecture Series page as we add bookings throughout the season. If you are ever stuck for a program at the last minute for any reason, maybe we can help. Contact us at mike@rosesolutions.net.
Happy New Year.

Yellow Roses

Graham Thomas

The weather has been unseasonably warm – often in the mid 50’s since Christmas. When Mike and I walked on the East Bay Bike Path this week, it felt like spring! We’re wondering what our roses and other plants will make of this weather, but meanwhile, we’ll enjoy the respite and the low heating bills knowing full well that old man winter is lurking just out of sight.

Graham Thomas

We usually spend this time of year evaluating our roses. As I was reviewing how some of our roses had performed last season, I mentioned to Mike that we have quite a number of yellow roses. Mike often comments during our programs that we’ve been in a “white” rose phase, but are moving into a more colorful, outrageous phase with roses like the yellow/orange/red blooms of Brothers Grimm. Yet, when asked what our favorite roses are, I’d start with David Austin’s Graham Thomas. It’s one of the oldest bushes we have and one that Mike fusses over with extra TLC. We feature it as a specimen plant in a special bed of its own where it can be seen as soon as you enter our back garden as well as from the kitchen window. When it’s at the peak of its June bloom, it’s easily 7 feet high and 6 feet wide. If the weather and timing is right, Graham Thomas also provides us with plenty of sprays and blooms to enter in our Rose Society’s Rose Show. We especially enjoy exhibiting Graham Thomas in an English Box. We like it so much that when we started our business, RoseSolutions, (www.rosesolutions.net) we selected Graham Thomas to be featured on the masthead of our web site and on our business cards as well.

Graham Thomas English Box

Another favorite – Julia Child – is also yellow and we chose it as the cover photo for our book Roses for New England: A Guide to Sustainable Rose Gardening. To my eye, you can’t have a more striking photograph than that of a yellow rose against green foliage. To further emphasize the yellow of Julia Child, our book designer chose a dark green color for the cover and no matter how many times I look at Roses for New England, I never tire of seeing Julia Child.

Julia Child on Book Cover

Yellow Brick Road is one more yellow rose that we really like. It’s planted right at the corner of our front rose garden next to the driveway, so every time I come in and out, it’s the first rose bush that catches my eye. I can see why yellow roses represent friendship and are given to friends who may need cheering up. They always brighten my day.

I made a list of yellow roses we have in our garden and they include Sunny Knock Out, Molineaux, Yellow Submarine and the Brownell Everbloomimg Pillar # 84 also known as Golden Arctic. We also grow the Easy Elegance Centennial, classified as an apricot blend grandiflora, but in our garden it’s a soft yellow. A few years ago we were given the new introductions Good as Gold (Carruth, 2014) and Happy Go Lucky (Bedard, 2014) –two more yellow roses – and asked to evaluate them. While many new introductions don’t make it past the two-season probation period in our garden, these roses got high marks.

Yellow Brick Road

Good as Gold is a spectacular addition to our garden, giving us nicely formed golden yellow blooms with a hint of red along its petal edges. I never tired of taking photographs of it. Good as Gold is a hybrid tea and is hardy to Zone 5.

Good as Gold

Happy Go Lucky is a pure yellow grandiflora with about 40 petals. It reminds me of the color of Julia Child so I wasn’t surprised to discover one of its parents is Julia Child. The foliage of Happy Go Lucky is darker than that of Julia’s, and so far Julia Child seems to be more floriferous. Happy Go Lucky is hardy to Zone 5.

Happy Go Lucky

Constant change is a hallmark of fine gardening and our fluid color preferences are good examples of keeping a garden fresh and interesting. With so many good new roses with great color available on the market every year, the challenge is deciding which ones to plant (and which ones to remove). While our changing tastes make those decisions a little easier, we know that our yellow favorites like Graham Thomas, Julia Child, Yellow Brick Road and Good as Gold are irreplaceable…for now.

Raiders in the Rose Garden

One morning last January after a light snowfall while checking out some climbers in the back of the garden, I froze, not from cold but from the sight of something I had never seen before – fresh hoof prints! Not paw prints from cats, squirrels, raccoons or the occasional red fox but hoof prints from deer. I brought Angelina out to show her and we slowly tracked the hoof prints around the garden like a modern-day Daniel and Mrs. Boone. We found where the raider, there was only one, had stopped to browse on rose hips and chew off the tips of late season growth. We discovered the neat little pellet pile where the invader had stopped for a break. We found the entry point – the yard next door; and the exit point – over the back fence. After 40 years of listening to all the horror stories from friends about deer in their gardens now we had them in ours.

Hoof Print

During the spring and summer months, from April through mid August, they prefer to stay in wooded areas out of the public eye apparently finding enough to eat. However, deer are capable of raiding anyone’s garden at anytime. They fancy succulent new growth like rose buds and fresh stems but will eat almost anything vegetative. A couple of deer can destroy a whole bloom cycle in a rose garden in one night. It’s when their natural food supply diminishes later in the year that the animals wander out of their usual habitats in force and forage where they are not wanted.

As destructive as deer feeding is, Lyme disease, transmitted by the deer ticks that hitch a ride on white-tailed deer (and other animals), is even of more concern. This tick-borne bacterial disease features joint pain, headaches, fever and fatigue and requires immediate treatment. The main vector is deer ticks that spend part of their life cycle on deer and another part lying in tall grasses, leaf litter, and other vegetation where deer may pass. This scrub vegetation is where humans come into contact with these ticks, get bitten, get infected, and get sick. Lyme disease is a serious and painful sickness that is wide spread in our area due to the proliferation of deer.

Deer damage

Because of these concerns, we were unwilling to surrender our gardens to these predators and decided on a course of action. My research showed a broad spectrum of possible remedies to discourage deer with various degrees of success. These included products like coyote urine, human hair, bars of scented soap, or other organic products that deer aren’t supposed to like. Other choices were various motion sensitive devices that would activate something that moved, like a rotating water jet, which would spook deer into leaving. The only sure-fire solution, however, was fencing. Our solution was based on a few premises. First, deer are creatures of habit and will return to good eats. Second, if they cannot actually see good eats they may go someplace else. Thirdly, make the good eats taste bad.

We started with the installation of a 6-foot stockade fence along one side of the property, the side where deer habitually entered, cutting off that avenue of attack. The fence also prevented deer from seeing into our garden. (I was told that deer can jump over a six-foot fence, but that has not been the case.) We had no problems from late March through mid August, although some of our neighbors did, when they returned one night for a snack. I immediately applied a treatment of Liquid Fence: Deer & Rabbit Repellant – foul-tasting, stinky stuff that deer hate – to rose foliage. (There is a wide range of other similar products with the same basic ingredients that will work as well.) The overt smell persisted for a few days to human noses and then disappeared but the residue lasts for quite a while and makes plant growth unpalatable to deer. The drawback is it looks like toothpaste on my roses but by August I could tolerate it. It seemed to work as there have been no more raids. Angelina thinks that the animals can smell the Liquid Fence from afar and that dissuades them. I plan on another application before Christmas. For now, I go out each morning on deer patrol to check for signs of infiltration and am relieved when I find none.

Garden with New Fence

I do not think deer have disappeared for good, only for awhile. I suspect that they will return when they get hungry enough perhaps gaining access through a short fence elsewhere on the property. If and when that happens, Daniel and Mrs. Boone will be ready with Plan B.

If any of you have had deer problems and found reasonable solutions, let me know.

Halloween Roses

Here in Rhode Island, fall is in the air. The leaves are turning color, the nights are getting colder, and … we have roses blooming in the garden! Both September and October have been warmer than average this year and that is the reason why our garden is having a larger, longer, and more colorful third bloom cycle. Playgirl, along with varieties such as Good as Gold, Passionate Kisses and My Girl, has been blooming late into the season.

Playgirl

With Halloween right around the corner, pumpkins are the decoration of choice and pumpkins can also be a way to uniquely display roses in the fall. Rather than let the roses sit on the bushes, we decided to buy a pumpkin and fill it with roses.
We had a good selection of roses for the pumpkin but my favorite was Playgirl, a floribunda hybridized in the United States by Ralph Moore in 1986. It blooms in clusters on short stems and once it starts blooming, nothing seems to stop it. With only 5-12 petals, it still has eye-catching appeal because of its deeply saturated medium pink color and bright yellow stamens that create a stunning contrast. Playgirl is a fairly new addition to our garden and is not readily available in our area, so Mike ordered it on-line. It’s given us spray after spray of 3-5 roses each, repeats quickly, and is shade tolerant.

Playboy

Playboy, the seed parent of Playgirl, has been in our garden for years. It was introduced in 1976 and hybridized by Scotland’s Alex Crocker. Playboy, like Playgirl, is a single rose, but unlike the pink flowers of Playgirl, its color is a combination of oranges, golds and scarlet. At a certain stage of bloom, there is nothing as beautiful as a spray of Playboy. It likes a little shade in the afternoon but, unfortunately, wasn’t in bloom at the time I filled my pumpkin “vase.”

Day Breaker

There are other ways to enjoy roses besides a vase or pumpkin. I place blooms in a bird bath – it’s a way to have roses in my kitchen garden where it’s too shady to grow roses. I like to place roses in decorative bowls filled with water on the dining room or coffee tables. Sometimes I use just one rose or gather several roses to place in larger bowls. To get the same size flowers, we use the terminal bud, the bud in the middle of the spray that opens first. This is the method we use when entering English Boxes in the rose show in June. We find that Graham Thomas, Day Breaker and Rainbow Sorbet have perfect form to be entered in English Box classes.

English Box with Day Breaker Roses

Now that the season is almost over, soon the autumn leaves will have fallen and we will have enjoyed our last roses of the season. While I think I will remember everything that takes place every year in our garden, keeping a Gardening Journal is the only way I can be certain I won’t forget. That’s why Mike and I are now in the process of publishing our next book, a journal for rose gardeners that will be available early next year. What a great way to keep track of all the events that happen each season in our New England garden.

Cherry Parfait