ROSES AFTER CHRISTMAS
Joan Shaw
Bicolor Rose 'Lynn Anderson'
Nothing is more appreciated by a gardener
after the hubbub of the holidays is over than to find the mailbox
stuffed with catalogs of seeds and plants, including those featuring
that best of all possible plants, the rose.
Here in Cache Valley the countryside is usually covered in snow by this time (January 5), but we've seen almost nothing but rain this past month. What little snow we had in November has been almost totally washed away and the snow line has retreated to above the foothills. Gardeners in this part of the country feel uneasy without the safety of snow cover to keep the more tender plants from the freeze-thaw cycle which breaks down their tissues, and I've been relieved that our gardening crew has covered most of our plants and all of our roses with wood chips and a mulch of leaves and grass.
So on this January, with no snow on the ground, plant catalogs with their colors warmly spreading over every page is like a promise that spring will come again and after that, summer. For now, Cache Valley has not only entered the Blah Season – that period of the year after our colorful leaves have fallen and before the snow falls to cover the valley with white – but has had the Blah Season extended by over a month. Everywhere we look is brown and gray and the sides of the highways are littered with bits and pieces of trash that were covered a couple of months ago with green and gold.
Blah, indeed!
Rose Alba Semi-plena, with Rosa Glauca to the right and red iris and emerging hollyhocks in the foreground
More later,
Here in Cache Valley the countryside is usually covered in snow by this time (January 5), but we've seen almost nothing but rain this past month. What little snow we had in November has been almost totally washed away and the snow line has retreated to above the foothills. Gardeners in this part of the country feel uneasy without the safety of snow cover to keep the more tender plants from the freeze-thaw cycle which breaks down their tissues, and I've been relieved that our gardening crew has covered most of our plants and all of our roses with wood chips and a mulch of leaves and grass.
So on this January, with no snow on the ground, plant catalogs with their colors warmly spreading over every page is like a promise that spring will come again and after that, summer. For now, Cache Valley has not only entered the Blah Season – that period of the year after our colorful leaves have fallen and before the snow falls to cover the valley with white – but has had the Blah Season extended by over a month. Everywhere we look is brown and gray and the sides of the highways are littered with bits and pieces of trash that were covered a couple of months ago with green and gold.
Blah, indeed!
Rose Alba Semi-plena, with Rosa Glauca to the right and red iris and emerging hollyhocks in the foreground
Not only are we experiencing an extended
Blah Season, but I've been laid up with a wrenched
back for over six months, and thanking the Heavens for Spencer and his
crew who kept the place tidier than it's ever been. I was thoroughly
tired already of gazing out the window at the bleakness of the Blah
Season in November. Gone
were the early June flowers I could only see from my window, gone was
the summer, gone the reds and golds of fall. And now, gone is even the
snow that should be there, turning the valley into a fairy land of
white.
So what a relief it was to be able to have reached the point of being able to spend some time sitting up at the computer this morning, pull up summer photos on the monitor, and consider where to put the list of many new plants I've been compiling for (I hope) a happier new gardening year. It was good, too, to see how the garden had burgeoned this past summer under the care of Spencer and his crew.
Especially rewarding was the tumbling and overflowing beauty of the Rosa Alba Semi-plena shown above. It seems only yesterday that it was a tiny, vulnerable, own-root slip of a thing from Vintage Gardens, though it was something like six years ago that I planted it. The Rosa Glauca to the Semi-plena's right in the photo was also rewarding.
We have several of these Glaucas growing throughout the gardens. The plants are vibrant with not only their bright burgundy flowers but the bluish green of the leaves – a perfect confluence of colors. They also offer an exuberant showing of deep cordovan hips in the fall against – by then – its bronzed leaves. A closeup of the Rosa Glauca blossoms are shown above right.
A Few Well-loved Bicolor Roses
The inspiration for searching out the newly planted rose shown at the top of this page (The bicolor 'Lynn Anderson') was a huge vase full of similar roses brought to me by my brother- and sister-in-law, Bill and Pam Shaw, for my birthday this past April. Three of these plants, 'Lynn Anderson' (Winchell, 1995), went into a tight ring in our new rose bed this spring and by the middle of summer were covered in charming blossoms. I found 'Lynn Anderson' in a local Cache Valley nursery, Tony's Grove (3915 Highway 91, Hyde Park, Utah, 435-563-2648). A similar bicolor, 'French Perfume' (Japan, 1993), I ordered from Heirloom Roses.
'Lynn Anderson' has large, well-formed blossoms of an off-white with moderately high centers, the petals edged in a nicely subdued pink. These roses are held on fairly long stems, so they're excellent for cutting, wonderful to look at, and nicely fragrant. The bush is also tall and upright. The colors of 'French Perfume', the second bicolor we planted, are slightly more intense, the high centers a yellow-cream, the pink on the petal edges more striking. And, of course, the fragrance is lovely.
I can recommend these two roses without reservation; they're beauties.
More Bicolors
Another couple of bicolors which also have the historical cachet of Old Garden Roses are the famous 'Sissinghurst Castle' (at left), a pale, plum- colored subtly striped rose and 'Ferdinand Pichard' (at right, below), a more boldly striped crimson and light pink. Both roses have one very heavy bloom period here, though they both take a couple of years to settle in before they start putting out any kind of a show.
'Ferdinand Pichard' (Tanne, France, 1921) has tightly rolled buds and high centered blossoms. After a day or two the crimson and pink turn to purple and pale pink. Since these colors naturally occur at the same time on the same bush, it affords a nicely diverse color combination. The plant is said to bloom throughout the season, but ours here has been so shaded by a newly constructed carport that it can't do much else but give us a small showing in the spring.
'Sissinghurst Castle', on the other hand, is out in full sun. The rose is an antique gallica that was found by the poet, The Hon. Victoria Sackville-West, in the castle's overgrown garden in Kent, England. She and her husband, Sir Harold Nicholson, bought the almost totally ruined property in 1930 and began to restore the extensive gardens surrounding the walls and towers that were all that was left of Sissinghurst Castle.
This fragrant rose is low growing here, reaching no more than three feet. It tends to sucker, though not thuggishly. I planted it on the western end of the oval bed in front of the house (that's surrounded by the drive), underneath a tall lamp. It puts out masses of faintly striped pink, very fragrant blossoms for the best part of a month.
Sissinghurst, One of the Most Beautiful Gardens in England
Peter Coats explains the success of Sissinghurst in his Great Gardens of Britain this way. "What makes the garden so special," he says, "is the architectural way in which it has been planned, the surviving walls of rosy old brick, and newly planted hedges of yew and beech, making a crisp and scholarly framework for the brimming flowerbeds."
Of course, we all can't have a ruined castle around which to arrange our flower beds, but the placement of hedges and trees, particularly evergreens in contrasting shapes and sizes, is the architectural equivalent. In the essay following this one, I do talk about the efficacy of trees, especially evergreens and their placement in the garden. I'm especially proud of the copse I planted ten years ago, mostly by myself (the trees were fairly little), after reading Noah's Garden by Sara Stein, a gift from my friend Helen Cannon in the summer of 1994.
In this thoroughly enjoyable book, Stein advocates not banishing the animals from our gardens, but instead reconciling the needs of both the animals and the gardeners to make a kind of ecological ark for everyone. I still dislike the mess that gophers make and keep chasing the destructive little beasts out into the alfalfa field by disrupting their burrows. And I'm careful where I step for fear of finding the tail of a wriggling and outraged garden snake under my foot.
But we do have a pleasurable little sitting area among conical and round headed evergreens, a variety of smallish berry trees and shrubs, and a few crabapples. The copse provides homes for many insects and birds, I saw a toad out there once, and regularly see over a dozen wild turkeys that still come around in a ragged herd, following each other and pecking at the ground. During one spring, a doe and her twin fauns spent the entire winter and spring in the copse and surrounding areas. (Unfortunately, the fauns grew up and kept coming back with their own offspring until we erected a deer fence.)
Statues
Another
and quicker way to adding architectural interest to a garden is a
careful placement of statues. Here, to
the right, is a statue of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, also known as
Elizabeth of the Roses. She's surrounded by a planting of carpet and
shrub roses, Mother of Thyme and, farther to the front of her, a
spreading mat of Lamium
'Beacon Silver'.
The legend of St. Elisabeth is an interesting one. She was born in the early years of the 13th century and died quite young at 24. She spent her short life in charitable work, building hospitals and feeding the poor. The legend has it that while she was taking bread to the poor in secret, her husband caught up to her and demanded to know what was in the pouch. Apparently, he was angry with her constant largesse and had warned her of it before (Elisabeth being one of the earliest "bleeding heart liberals?").
Elizabeth opened her pouch in all innocence and the bread she was distributing turned miraculously into roses, saving her goodness knows what punishment. Wikipedia writes that this legend has no basis in fact. Her husband, Ludwig IV of Thuringia appeared to be a sainted type himself and not averse to having his wife distribute his wealth to the poor and sick.
But it's a pretty story and there is a statue of her in Budapest in front of the neo-Gothic church dedicated to Elizabeth in Roses' Square. The legend, however much on shaky ground, seems to be fairly well cemented into the fabric of Hungary.
We have other, smaller staues – namely ducks, geese, partridges, and an otter. None of them do any damage, and the geese do not hiss or bite! We have had geese on this place, years ago, and believe me, they are not the most peaceful animals to have around. We also have a rather large Celtic Cross that I'm anxious to place as soon as Spring come
s along.
So what a relief it was to be able to have reached the point of being able to spend some time sitting up at the computer this morning, pull up summer photos on the monitor, and consider where to put the list of many new plants I've been compiling for (I hope) a happier new gardening year. It was good, too, to see how the garden had burgeoned this past summer under the care of Spencer and his crew.
Especially rewarding was the tumbling and overflowing beauty of the Rosa Alba Semi-plena shown above. It seems only yesterday that it was a tiny, vulnerable, own-root slip of a thing from Vintage Gardens, though it was something like six years ago that I planted it. The Rosa Glauca to the Semi-plena's right in the photo was also rewarding.
We have several of these Glaucas growing throughout the gardens. The plants are vibrant with not only their bright burgundy flowers but the bluish green of the leaves – a perfect confluence of colors. They also offer an exuberant showing of deep cordovan hips in the fall against – by then – its bronzed leaves. A closeup of the Rosa Glauca blossoms are shown above right.
A Few Well-loved Bicolor Roses
The inspiration for searching out the newly planted rose shown at the top of this page (The bicolor 'Lynn Anderson') was a huge vase full of similar roses brought to me by my brother- and sister-in-law, Bill and Pam Shaw, for my birthday this past April. Three of these plants, 'Lynn Anderson' (Winchell, 1995), went into a tight ring in our new rose bed this spring and by the middle of summer were covered in charming blossoms. I found 'Lynn Anderson' in a local Cache Valley nursery, Tony's Grove (3915 Highway 91, Hyde Park, Utah, 435-563-2648). A similar bicolor, 'French Perfume' (Japan, 1993), I ordered from Heirloom Roses.
'Lynn Anderson' has large, well-formed blossoms of an off-white with moderately high centers, the petals edged in a nicely subdued pink. These roses are held on fairly long stems, so they're excellent for cutting, wonderful to look at, and nicely fragrant. The bush is also tall and upright. The colors of 'French Perfume', the second bicolor we planted, are slightly more intense, the high centers a yellow-cream, the pink on the petal edges more striking. And, of course, the fragrance is lovely.
I can recommend these two roses without reservation; they're beauties.
More Bicolors
Another couple of bicolors which also have the historical cachet of Old Garden Roses are the famous 'Sissinghurst Castle' (at left), a pale, plum- colored subtly striped rose and 'Ferdinand Pichard' (at right, below), a more boldly striped crimson and light pink. Both roses have one very heavy bloom period here, though they both take a couple of years to settle in before they start putting out any kind of a show.
'Ferdinand Pichard' (Tanne, France, 1921) has tightly rolled buds and high centered blossoms. After a day or two the crimson and pink turn to purple and pale pink. Since these colors naturally occur at the same time on the same bush, it affords a nicely diverse color combination. The plant is said to bloom throughout the season, but ours here has been so shaded by a newly constructed carport that it can't do much else but give us a small showing in the spring.
'Sissinghurst Castle', on the other hand, is out in full sun. The rose is an antique gallica that was found by the poet, The Hon. Victoria Sackville-West, in the castle's overgrown garden in Kent, England. She and her husband, Sir Harold Nicholson, bought the almost totally ruined property in 1930 and began to restore the extensive gardens surrounding the walls and towers that were all that was left of Sissinghurst Castle.
This fragrant rose is low growing here, reaching no more than three feet. It tends to sucker, though not thuggishly. I planted it on the western end of the oval bed in front of the house (that's surrounded by the drive), underneath a tall lamp. It puts out masses of faintly striped pink, very fragrant blossoms for the best part of a month.
Sissinghurst, One of the Most Beautiful Gardens in England
Peter Coats explains the success of Sissinghurst in his Great Gardens of Britain this way. "What makes the garden so special," he says, "is the architectural way in which it has been planned, the surviving walls of rosy old brick, and newly planted hedges of yew and beech, making a crisp and scholarly framework for the brimming flowerbeds."
Of course, we all can't have a ruined castle around which to arrange our flower beds, but the placement of hedges and trees, particularly evergreens in contrasting shapes and sizes, is the architectural equivalent. In the essay following this one, I do talk about the efficacy of trees, especially evergreens and their placement in the garden. I'm especially proud of the copse I planted ten years ago, mostly by myself (the trees were fairly little), after reading Noah's Garden by Sara Stein, a gift from my friend Helen Cannon in the summer of 1994.
In this thoroughly enjoyable book, Stein advocates not banishing the animals from our gardens, but instead reconciling the needs of both the animals and the gardeners to make a kind of ecological ark for everyone. I still dislike the mess that gophers make and keep chasing the destructive little beasts out into the alfalfa field by disrupting their burrows. And I'm careful where I step for fear of finding the tail of a wriggling and outraged garden snake under my foot.
But we do have a pleasurable little sitting area among conical and round headed evergreens, a variety of smallish berry trees and shrubs, and a few crabapples. The copse provides homes for many insects and birds, I saw a toad out there once, and regularly see over a dozen wild turkeys that still come around in a ragged herd, following each other and pecking at the ground. During one spring, a doe and her twin fauns spent the entire winter and spring in the copse and surrounding areas. (Unfortunately, the fauns grew up and kept coming back with their own offspring until we erected a deer fence.)
Statues
Another
and quicker way to adding architectural interest to a garden is a
careful placement of statues. Here, to
the right, is a statue of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, also known as
Elizabeth of the Roses. She's surrounded by a planting of carpet and
shrub roses, Mother of Thyme and, farther to the front of her, a
spreading mat of Lamium
'Beacon Silver'.The legend of St. Elisabeth is an interesting one. She was born in the early years of the 13th century and died quite young at 24. She spent her short life in charitable work, building hospitals and feeding the poor. The legend has it that while she was taking bread to the poor in secret, her husband caught up to her and demanded to know what was in the pouch. Apparently, he was angry with her constant largesse and had warned her of it before (Elisabeth being one of the earliest "bleeding heart liberals?").
Elizabeth opened her pouch in all innocence and the bread she was distributing turned miraculously into roses, saving her goodness knows what punishment. Wikipedia writes that this legend has no basis in fact. Her husband, Ludwig IV of Thuringia appeared to be a sainted type himself and not averse to having his wife distribute his wealth to the poor and sick.
But it's a pretty story and there is a statue of her in Budapest in front of the neo-Gothic church dedicated to Elizabeth in Roses' Square. The legend, however much on shaky ground, seems to be fairly well cemented into the fabric of Hungary.
We have other, smaller staues – namely ducks, geese, partridges, and an otter. None of them do any damage, and the geese do not hiss or bite! We have had geese on this place, years ago, and believe me, they are not the most peaceful animals to have around. We also have a rather large Celtic Cross that I'm anxious to place as soon as Spring come
s along.
Joan Katherine Shaw
January
2006
Photos - Joan Katherine Shaw
Sources for Books mentioned in this
essay:
The Rose Book of Graham Stuart Thomas
Classic Roses by Peter Beales
Some on-line sources for roses:
Arena Rose Company
David Austin Roses Limited
High Country Roses
Jackson and Perkins
Roses of Yesterday and Today
Vintage Gardens (a source of more than 3,000 different varieties of roses)
Wayside Gardens, South Carolina
White Flower Farm
More on roses:
A Miniature Rose Garden in Utah
Cascading Roses
Old White Roses
Prolific Climbing Roses for the North
Roses of the Middle East
Some Tough but Elegant Roses
Three Favorite Roses
Dreaming of Roses
Cottage Gardens with Roses
The Charm of Single Roses
Cottage Gardens: Not as easy as they look
The Rose Book of Graham Stuart Thomas
Classic Roses by Peter Beales
Some on-line sources for roses:
Arena Rose Company
David Austin Roses Limited
High Country Roses
Jackson and Perkins
Roses of Yesterday and Today
Vintage Gardens (a source of more than 3,000 different varieties of roses)
Wayside Gardens, South Carolina
White Flower Farm
More on roses:
A Miniature Rose Garden in Utah
Cascading Roses
Old White Roses
Prolific Climbing Roses for the North
Roses of the Middle East
Some Tough but Elegant Roses
Three Favorite Roses
Dreaming of Roses
Cottage Gardens with Roses
The Charm of Single Roses
Cottage Gardens: Not as easy as they look
Next:
Garden Architecture
Click for excerpt of Joan Shaw's The Uncle and
Other Stories
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Member:
American Rose Society
American Horticulture Society
National Wildlife Federation
National Arbor Day Society
The Nature Conservancy
Member:
American Rose Society
American Horticulture Society
National Wildlife Federation
National Arbor Day Society
The Nature Conservancy
All contents copyright (c) 2000-2006 by Joan K. Shaw.
All
rights reserved.