Even though my garden is small some of my roses aren’t and it is quite an undertaking to accomplish this job each year. The photo above shows rosa ‘Pierre de Ronsard’ in all her deleaved and pruned architectural glory.
The Pierre is still a little lonely in this bed, but I finally made the decision to plant rosa ‘Charles Darwin’ to his side. Do you see the big hole to his right lined by white irrigation pipes? That is where Charles will go and I hope these two will flower well and harmonize together
I have rosa ‘Charles Darwin’ already grown to a decent size. He is the rose in the big container in the middle of the picture. I hope his huge root ball will stand up to the root competition with the Queen Palms and the Strelitzia Nicolais in this bed.
But before he could be transplanted I needed to deleave and prune him, too. What you can’t see on the photo is that there was plenty of oxalis, an obnoxious weed here in my neck of the woods, growing in the container as well. Boy, did I stung my fingers bloody to get this nasty stuff out of the container.
I have decided to reduce the number of roses that I grow in containers on our terrace first of all because the roses don’t do so well at this location in the increased summer heat in the last couple of years. But secondly they need to be deadheaded absolutely diligently otherwise all the petals are ending up in our pool, which is close by. Because of time reasons I haven’t been able to deadhead the roses daily last summer and the pool often became a mess.
On the other side of our kitchen door, which leads to the terrace, is an identical arrangement of containers and plants. My idea is to replace both roses in the biggest containers with either citrus trees or small tropical palms and switch out the miniature roses and boxwoods with herbs. I think it will be nice to have herbs handy for cooking so close to the kitchen.
So with this mind, I decided to repot rosa ‘Jilly Jewel’, the miniature rose in the foreground to the left, into a black plastic container and put her in the pot ghetto for now until I can decide where to place her in the garden.
Here you see rosa ‘Jilly Jewel’ pruned and in her new larger container.
When I was at one of the big box stores to buy more compost for the garden they had organic herbs for sale and this Spearmint jumped right into my shopping card. I assume that this will be very easy to grow and I love to pick a few leaves of mint to brew a tea or decorate a desert.
I could literally see the Spearmint perking up under my eyes the moment it was repotted and watered.
This is how the combo looked at the end. The fresh green of the mint is so nice but makes the suffering boxwood look even more miserable. I have to find another place for it soon.
When I was at the big box store I also stumbled over these stock and couldn’t leave them behind. Last year I have fallen in love with stock for its beautiful blooms, I especially like the double ones, and wonderful very strong fragrance. These found spots in the front yard which I will show you in my next garden post.
I am also busy like a bee going through all my potted own-root roses, deleaving, pruning, it is often actually more a very gentle shaping, and some get re-potted like these three. I forgot the names of the two to the left but I know the one to the right is rosa ‘Charles Rennie Mackintosh’.
Here they got their hair cut and also have been potted up from two-gallon containers into five-gallon containers. ‘Charles Rennie Mackintosh’ is the one in the middle now.
The view of my White Garden Bed. All rose are deleaved and pruned and some of them have started to leave out again already, even though this is hard to see in the photo.
Each year I have the tradition to order a few more own-root roses in the winter. This time I have ordered for the very first time from David Austin Roses directly. The ones of you who follow my blog know that I am a big lover of roses bred by David Austin but so far I only got his creations from other nurseries.
The box they come in looks pretty nice, don’t you think?
After opening the box I was surprised to find a rose only wrapped in a big plastic bag, Nothing to keep the roots moist.
Freeing the rose from the plastic it turns out that it has survived the travel rather well. I ordered ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’, a wonderful saturated pink rose with big blooms and a great strong fragrance. I have seen this rose in English Gardens and it simply blew me away. I can only hope that it will do as well in my garden here in Southern California.
But what is that? Do you see the one cane being completely bent and almost looking like a snake? How did this happen?
I decided to cut it off at the bending part and hope that new growth will sprout from it. Wish me luck that the rose will leave out soon. Only then you know if it really survived the transport and transplant.
I am looking forward to receiving three more roses from David Austin this year. Find out which varieties I ordered soon here on the blog. They are also own-root roses, but they come planted in two-quart containers. They will be much smaller than ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ the bare root own-root rose that you see here in the photos.
After all these bare rose canes I would like to leave you with a photo of the refreshing green leaves and lovely white flowers of campanula poscharskyana ‘Alba’, also called the White Serbian Bellflower. I was very surprised to see it bloom so early in my garden. I wonder if there is a correlation with all the rain that we were getting this winter.
Hope you are all enjoying a nice weekend!
See you in the garden!
Warm regards,
Christina
