Roses in Their Glorious June Bloom

The rose June bloom is always such a spectacular sight and this year it was a few days early, just in time for our Rose Garden Open House. Despite the weather, many people came to view our gardens and we enjoyed showing them our roses.

Brian DeMello

We had an added bonus on Saturday afternoon with the arrival of the photographer from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine who spent 3 hours taking pictures of our garden for an article that will appear in May 2012.

In a few days we’ll be getting ready to exhibit our roses in the Rhode Island Rose Society 13th Annual Rose Show, “La Vie en Rose,” which will be held this Saturday, June 18, at the Cold Spring Community Center in Wickford, RI. For more information go to our News & Events page at http://rosesolutions.net or visit the RI Rose Society web site: http://rirs.org

Here are some pictures of our rose gardens as they looked over the past weekend.

Mike’s Cairn

Sustainable Garden

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Mother Nature – 2; Rose Gardeners – 0

 

After dealing with the broken tree limb that crashed into our garden a few days ago, we thought we’d be home free for our Rose Garden Open House today (and tomorrow). Unfortunately, once again, Mother Nature threw us a curve ball in the form of rain.

We had been hopeful by the weather forecasts at the begining of the week that this weekend would be, if not sunny, at least rain-free. But by yesterday scattered showers were predicted. Not great news, but we comforted ourselves by saying it could be worse. And it was — besides being damp, cold, and windy, the rain started at 8 am and alternated between showers and downpours. We dressed like it was the middle of March.

'White Licorice' bloom

But rose gardeners are hardy people and despite the weather many visitors toured our gardens. As you can see by our pictures, the roses didn’t care what Mother nature did and they couldn’t have looked better.

We hope for clearer skies tomorrow.

 

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Introducing Angelina & Mike Chute’s Rose Journal

Welcome to The Rose Journal. Let us introduce ourselves. We’re Angelina and Mike Chute from East Providence, RI and have been growing roses for over 20 years. Between our two rose gardens and the roses we grow in containers, we have over 300 roses. Besides growing roses, we exhibit roses, write about roses, talk about roses, and teach about roses through our consulting business RoseSolutions.  We also wrote a book about roses: Roses for New England: A Guide to Sustainable Rose Gardening (Forbes River Publishing, 2010).

Several years ago we established a web site, http://www.rosesolutions.net/  where you can find information about different varieties of roses, especially vintage Brownell roses and sustainable, easy-to-grow roses as well as  numerous articles about rose horticulture. When we’re not working in the garden or giving lectures at Flower Shows or garden clubs, we travel as much as possible, always looking for  gardens to explore.

Other interests include visiting art museums, and since I (Angelina) am an avid needlepointer, we include visiting needlepoint stores wherever we go. A popular subject of my needlepoint projects is, of course, roses! (A few years ago Mike drove me across the state of Arizona to a town called Surprise only to find the needlepoint shop there closed…surprise!)

We’ll be posting frequently to our blog – information will vary from what’s going on in our garden or the rose world to the interesting sights and gardens we’ve visited on our trips. We will include a lot of pictures, like this one of ‘All the Rage’ (hybridized by Ping Lim) – the first rose that bloomed in our garden this year. It is also a very sustainable, disease resistant rose and we ranked it as our Number 1 favorite rose of 2010.

Sometimes Angelina will blog; other times Mike; occasionally the two of us will collaborate as we did on our book and articles.

We look forward to reading your comments and invite you to visit our web site (http://www.rosesolutions.net/)

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