Garden

[JustJazzmom]

Tamora. a low growing but very thorny apricot English rose: with my gnome rain gauge in the background!

[Ms X]

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@Julie928 wrote:

David Austin roses are the best!  They have a smaller one called 'The Fairy.'  As an avid fairy gardener I wanted a couple of these so bad but this is the second year I missed out on them!  They sold out so quick and are available only to ship in 2017!  Must be as beautiful in person as they are in the catalog!  :-)

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The Fairy is a classic rose not exclusive to David Austin.  It is very cold tolerant and can be grown all the way up to Maine.  It has tiny pink flowers that grow in clusters and grows into a rounded, somewhat weeping bush.  In the northern U.S., it starts blooming in July and goes to the frost.  It gets no diseases and so does not need to be sprayed.  Some roses are prone to black spot and other problems while others are disease free.  I've had this rose for years.  It's great for people who don't want to have to tend their garden a lot.

[Ms X]

I just love roses and have about a dozen of them in my very tiny yard!  Whenever I tell people to buy roses, they insist that they can't because they're too much trouble.  If you choose carefully, they are the easiest plants to grow.  Hybrid tea roses are prone to black spot and are the most common to find at garden centers where I live.  They're the ones that give people the idea that roses are a pain to grow. 

I love the Antique Rose Emporium for rarer roses.  I got Zepherine Drouhin (sp?) from them many years ago and have this immensely fragrant, thorn-free pink rose growing up against my front porch.  It has a huge bloom in June followed by sporadic flowers.  It is very prone to black spot and so needs to be sprayed.  I have another antique rose covering an ugly chain link fence (Ghislaine de Feligonde) that also has one long bloom but is very cold tolerant and disease free.  The two Bourbon roses along the side of my house are so fragrant that I can smell them at my kitchen window. I have this discount white rose way in the back of my yard that has grown to be about 8 feet tall and wide and blooms about three times a year.  It has gigantic thorns but is indestructible and has certainly proved its worth for being a mutt among classic roses.

I could go on all day about my roses.  When choosing a rose, consider its habit (length, width, and overall shape), disease resistance, and blooming time (continuous like The Fairy, continuous in flushes, or once-blooming).  Many of the old roses bloom only once.  They're worth getting for their beauty, though, because that one bloom is a doozy.  Just plant something next to it that will flower when that rose is out of bloom.

[Ms X]

I have a tiny area in front of my house that's about 8' x 5'.  I have three roses there:  The Fairy, Champlain, and Graham Thomas.  I have so many flowers in the summer that it's not funny. 

[JustJazzmom]

@Ms X

How well I remember Zepherine Droughin on my wooden arbor!! In June it used to bloom so well!! Until Superstorm Sandy blew down the arbor for good! They ended up being dug out and donated to a Village Restoration area who wanted year appropriate landscape for the homes that were in that 'village'. They ended up being trained to a wooden fence.

'Graham Thomas' I used to own- a golden yellow English rose for those not familiar with it and it had a large habit growing about 6' or more in height (if you didn't prune it back) and about 4' wide. I used to use this rose as my 'indicator rose' for blackspot. Unfortunately, despite it being a beautiful colored rose, it got blackspot. I ended up donating that for a plant sale. In its place went 'Double Knock Out'.

I do not spray insecticides fungicides and prefer organic methods.

[Ms X]

How interesting, JustJazzMom!  You should get another Zepherine Drouhin!  There's nothing like it in June!  It is a pain with the black spot, though.  I think QVC sells it as part of a trio of climbing roses, or at least they used to. 

In addition to the Antique Rose Emporium, I've also gotten roses from Heirloom Roses.  The latter company used to send year-old plants, so they were very small indeed!  The company was sold a few years ago, so maybe they're not selling the younger plants.  At any rate, Heirloom Roses used to sell an enormous variety of roses.  I haven't been to their web site lately, though, as I have no room for more roses.  Ghislaine de Feligonde came from them as a tiny plant and is now many feet long and just huge trained along the fence.

[JustJazzmom]

No longer have a wooden arbor for it Ms. X! For those interested the Zepherine is usually sold own root (not grafted) and its thornless (thus my reasoning for using it on an arbor). It can get at least 12' high so with a square arbor, you can train the canes upward and across the arbor from either side. What I had originally done was also plant two 'Rosemoor' clematis on the interior of the arbor sides so that the roses were on the outside and the clematis was on the interior. Only one clematis survived Sandy and that was then transplanted to be inside a 5' obelisk.  I train that so it grows inside the obelisk.

Two other reputable rose companies that sell own root roses are Chamblee Nursery out of TX and Roses Unlimited out of SC.