Growing Roses
My main gardening activity is growing vegetables, I love doing this and they feed our bodies as well as a sense of being part of nature. However part of our venture into country life is about growing a beautiful garden and for me that includes roses. As well as being beautiful, roses are the most drought tolerant and hardy plants. Their delicate beauty belies their resilience.
My garden vision it to have a thousand roses. We are up to over one hundred now I think. The first things I planted here were a couple of roses, when I was feeling homesick for my old garden.
They grew well and so I decided that the garden in front of our veranda would be a yellow and pink rose garden. So it is and only two years after planting and with no significant rain it is amazing. We had roses for eleven months last year.
This year we decided to plant a white rose garden in front of this and also another garden to welcome our first grandchild. When Katie was pregnant they called their baby Joey, Katie is an expatriate Aussie in Brighton, so we planted a big garden of Just joeys!
At the same time Peter found all these metal ladders at work that he brought home and turned into a structure to have roses clamber over so we ordered ten climbing roses.
As spring unfolded we were worried to notice that our new roses either grew too quickly and were susceptible to late late frost or didn't seem to grow at all.
Last weekend I gave in and dug up some of the climbers and planted them into pots in the hope of coaxing some life into them. I also bought four established climbers to plant as we do not want to miss a year of growth. I think most of the white roses are going to make it and maybe ten out of twenty Just Joeys, so I am on the hunt for some established Joeys, as my vision was for that garden to look spectacular when Jemima (Joey turned into Jemima) is here over Christmas. The other day when I was in the nursery in Orange looking for Just Joey's and told them my story they said a lot of roses from the company I had purchased from had failed this year. Even though this company had a great reputation the roses were really very cheap and it has reminded me that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is!
I am working in Sydney all this week so will be going to all the nurseries to try and get a few more joey's. However in the meantime the roses we have established are so rewarding
, having survived late frost, a dust storm and aphids and still flowering really well already.
The first Spring Rose, the day after the big dust storm
Rose garden
The First of the white roses
Rose Rescue
My garden vision it to have a thousand roses. We are up to over one hundred now I think. The first things I planted here were a couple of roses, when I was feeling homesick for my old garden.
They grew well and so I decided that the garden in front of our veranda would be a yellow and pink rose garden. So it is and only two years after planting and with no significant rain it is amazing. We had roses for eleven months last year.
This year we decided to plant a white rose garden in front of this and also another garden to welcome our first grandchild. When Katie was pregnant they called their baby Joey, Katie is an expatriate Aussie in Brighton, so we planted a big garden of Just joeys!
At the same time Peter found all these metal ladders at work that he brought home and turned into a structure to have roses clamber over so we ordered ten climbing roses.
As spring unfolded we were worried to notice that our new roses either grew too quickly and were susceptible to late late frost or didn't seem to grow at all.
Last weekend I gave in and dug up some of the climbers and planted them into pots in the hope of coaxing some life into them. I also bought four established climbers to plant as we do not want to miss a year of growth. I think most of the white roses are going to make it and maybe ten out of twenty Just Joeys, so I am on the hunt for some established Joeys, as my vision was for that garden to look spectacular when Jemima (Joey turned into Jemima) is here over Christmas. The other day when I was in the nursery in Orange looking for Just Joey's and told them my story they said a lot of roses from the company I had purchased from had failed this year. Even though this company had a great reputation the roses were really very cheap and it has reminded me that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is!
I am working in Sydney all this week so will be going to all the nurseries to try and get a few more joey's. However in the meantime the roses we have established are so rewarding
, having survived late frost, a dust storm and aphids and still flowering really well already.The first Spring Rose, the day after the big dust storm
Rose garden
The First of the white roses
Rose Rescue
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