HELPMEFIND PLANTS COMMERCIAL NON-COMMERCIAL RESOURCES EVENTS PEOPLE RATINGS
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Initial post
6 APR 14 by
Smtysm
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Hello. It would be great to get an update on the health and vigour of the plants when the weather warms up.
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You have no idea how long it has taken me to be able to recover access to my account. Today after decisive mental mobilization I succeeded. Now, late as can be, an answer to your question.
The problem is I can't give you a clear answer. My garden being unirrigated is very much subject to the vagaries of the weather. Last year (2014) we had an unusual summer, with fairly frequent rains through the summer instead of our usual drought; and this fall saw the beginning of the third wet year in a row. A general answer is this:
The most common fungal disease in the garden is mildew, to which perhaps half the roses in the garden fall prey during the summer. The mildew is unsightly but doesn't cause defoliation or appear to do any significant damage. In rainy periods, mainly in early and mid-fall when the roses still have their leaves but will drop them shortly, I see a certain amount of black spot. This disease can also occur on susceptible plants during rainy spells during the summer, as happened last year. Like the mildew it's unsightly but doesn't provoke defoliation.
Last year for the first time I saw rust for the second year in a row. This is a rare disease in my garden, occurring only if we get a significant rainy spell in late spring or summer. It afflicts only a few specific roses: 'Alba Maxima' is susceptible; and 'Zephirine Drouhin' has gotten it. My experience has been that when the weather patterns change to their more usual pattern of the rain gradually drying up in late spring and stopping for the summer, the rust goes away. I think rust does weaken the roses, but then it doesn't happen that often, and they're able to recover.
I live in a climate that I consider to be in general friendly to most of the roses I grow. I like the once-blooming old roses very much, and the warm climate old roses, though the latter are more difficult to grow here because of our extremely heavy soil. The Mediterranean climate, with its good annual rainfall (about 40"), rainy winters with good winter chill but few hard freezes, and dry summers, hot during the day but cooler at night, is favorable to roses (and to many other plants). Our main problem here is our soil, which is mostly a gray clay that's so nearly pure that it can be molded in the hands. When we started gardening here I greatly underestimated the need for organic amendment, a mistake I'm still paying for and busy correcting. We do a huge amount of digging. Once the soil has been adequately amended the once-blooming old roses do fine with no further intervention than an occasional weeding and their annual pruning. The warm climate old roses need a lighter soil which is very difficult to create; in the garden they generally do best in beds that have been terraced up, which isn't always easy to do. If the soil can be gotten right, though, they're magnificent. I also love the Pemberton hybrid musks, and they too seem to like a lighter soil, but cooler temperatures than the Teas, and part shade.
There are various pests and unpleasantnesses that afflict the roses in the garden, mostly irritating but not fatal. Probably most of my roses don't realize their potential, and I would like to grow them better. My working hypothesis is that if I can get the soil right--which means simply adequate amendment with organic matter--everything else will go well enough. I accept a degree of foliage and flower imperfection as a reasonable tradeoff for not using the many poisons available for garden use. If a rose seems really to hate my conditions no matter what, I don't grow it. I've given up on Rugosas, for example, and suspect that the early spring species yellows will always struggle here. And anything that requires pampering must find another home.
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#3 of 8 posted
15 JAN 15 by
Smtysm
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Thanks for sharing your garden news. I sympathise with you on the digging and clay challenge. I have soil [if you could call it 'soil' as such] that has exactly the same properties you describe, and know how it feels to dig it, especially among tree roots. I've dealt with mine with gypsum and a lot of horse poo. That introduces lots of the organic component clay sufferers need, without being extremely rich in nitrogen. Of course the rugosas wouldn't like the clay. I killed Rose à Parfum de l'Hay with mine, much to my great at the time sadness and guilt, and that's even a Rugosa Hybrid that's not so Rugosa-ish as some. Any old mulch you can find to stack on will help form a new layer of humus that the worms will process in. Your organic, soil-centred approach sounds excellent. Do you have any photos? I bet your garden is amazing, and it would be fascinating to see it in all its states, summer through to winter.
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Our lives changed when we discovered old hay. I live in farm country, and the farmers rank manure right up there with gold so it's not to be had, but nobody has any use for old hay. Except us. We buy some tons of it every year and use it to amend planting holes and mulch the beds. You sound like you know just what a struggle it is to make a decent soil. I took a look at your garden and yes, your soil DOES look like ours. I've never had our soil analyzed, partly from laziness, partly because I want to see how far I can get by direct observation alone, but my guess is that its ph is close to neutral and that it has good mineral content. We can grow a very fair assortment of plants once we've amended it adequately. Along with the hay I feed all the organic matter the garden produces--prunings, grass and weeds--right back into the garden. But large areas of it are still grossly under-amended. We've begun having planting holes dug by a small excavator, this is an ongoing experiment, but I think it's going to be worth the trouble.
The camera and I are not friends. I would love for a camera and gardening addict to come pay a visit and then post photos.
You look like you have a very good start on your garden, after a lot of labor. Our garden I believe is more likely to appeal to a plant person and addicted gardener than it is to, for example, someone who wants to see a bright mass of flowers. We started with two areas: a large steep field of poverty-stricken grass in full sun, and a likewise steep drainage in the woods, the site of an old slide, that had grown up into brush and had been used as a dump and as the site of a burn pile. The latter is well on its way to being a very satisfactory garden, though now we're also cleaning up the woods beneath it but the field has a long way to go, and we're still expanding and working on planting basic shrubs and trees, with conditions not yet in place for the refinements of select herbaceous plants. The area given to gardening covers two or three acres. Of course we're forever behind on maintenance. So much of the time I look around and think what a weed patch I have, but at least it's clear that yes, there is a garden here, and at times, it's pretty satisfactory. I get a lot of joy from my garden. It's coming along.
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#5 of 8 posted
16 JAN 15 by
Smtysm
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Melissa, I'd truly gladly come and take millions of photos if only I could. Yep, your garden sounds just excellent. To this inmate of the 'burbs your shady dump/burn site and golden dry hill slope sound magical. We each contend with unique contours and conditions, and their idiosyncratic nature imposes limitations that for me at least enhance the possibilities. Better a slightly scrunched bit of paper than a blank canvas every time. I love that you're in that wonderful phase of really accelerated creativity. Long may it continue! Thanks for the vicarious delight.
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Should you ever make it to Italy you're invited for a visit, with or without camera. We have room for guests. Our chief rose season is May-first half of June, and one can only pray for decent weather leading up to the flowering. There's a good deal happening in April, too, but no roses as a rule. I have few visitors, and only rarely encounter someone who appreciates plants, the whole plant, and not just the flower, but you sound like you might be one of them.
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#7 of 8 posted
22 FEB 15 by
Smtysm
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I will love to come. Thank you! I once passed within possibly 10 km of your yet to be born garden on my way south from Milan via Bologna. Next time, I'll get off the beaten track to come and be inspired by the results of your beautiful project. Ready to put on my boots and lend a hand too.
If you ever have a spare moment, though, to point a camera, however humble or hurriedly, in the general direction of your garden it would be really great. There is what someone once described wonderfully as 'rose porn' of which there is a superabundance, and then there are images that give fellow gardeners a real glimpse of the way real roses are really growing in various situations and conditions, so that we are not just impressed but can learn and empathise with people facing challenges similar to or different from our own. These sorts of photos are the precious ones. What you are doing with your garden is wonderful. Please post here how it goes from month to month if you have time.
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Well! I'll keep it in mind. Roses are only one part of the garden, and talking about everything else is doubtfully appropriate on HMF. The roses won't get going leafing out and forming buds until April, with the very first blooms appearing at the end of that month. Rose season is basically May through the first half of June, after which everything shuts down during the summer drought. If there are good late summer rains we get some fall bloom. This winter, though unpleasant, has been warmer than average, and perhaps for that reason I've had a few battered flowers all along: 'Sanguinea' and 'Old Blush' are two that come to mind that try to bloom twelve months of the year.
February has been a bad month, all rain, clouds, and two snowfalls, the first one somewhat more than a foot of very heavy snow. The previous winter we had no snow at all and very warm temperatures, and then it was unusually rainy through the summer. The result was that all the plants made a great deal of growth. Then when this heavy snow came, the warm climate evergreen plants that had grown so much got bent down or outright smashed. I've been busy cutting back Italian cypresses, pittosporum, and rosemary. Worst of all is the damage to the Teas. I'm always afraid they'll sulk if I cut away big basal canes or remove a significant part of the growth (shortening canes, say, by a third), and so I let them grow even with insect or disease damage at the base of the canes; and the canes sooner or later always suffer this damage. The roses seem able to put out healthy new growth from these compromised canes and maintain it at least for some years; the problem comes with a heavy snow, which the canes, damaged and tending to grow horizontally, just can't support. It may be a built-in problem with Teas grown in less-than-perfect conditions (soil, wet at perhaps the wrong time of year, cane girdler) and in a climate in which heavy snowfalls (I mean more than a foot of snow) come most winters.
Winter pruning and cleanup continues between bouts of bad weather. I have until about the beginning of spring to finish pruning. Usually I start with the once-flowering roses of European origin, the ones that are cleanly deciduous, continue with mixed bloods like the Hybrid Musks, and then finish in March with the warm climate roses, particularly the handful of big climbers: I do them last so that there will be less chance of their being roused into new growth that's then damaged by a late frost. This scheme has been somewhat upset this year, first by our continuing planting unusually late, through all of January, then by the mess caused by the snow, which has led me to prune, often, whatever my eyes fell on first (I'm still saving the Noisettes and Tea climbers for last, though). It was just all too awful to look at.
Well, off to the garden. I have 'Mme. Alfred Carriere', which I'm training as a kind of half-shrub, half-climber, to civilize, plus the plants around it. Also down in the shade garden to work on 'Treasure Trove', which is growing on a trellis since the black locust it was growing up blew down in a storm. And the painful job of cleaning up 'Spray Cecile Brunner'. This had gotten about ten feet tall and I knew I needed to do something about it, but procrastinated; then the snow took matters out of my hands by flattening it, with help from branches falling from the willow nearby. If 'Spray Cecile Brunner' resents pruning I'm going to find out.
You were about, oh, 22 kilometers away, I believe. Come over the next time, shovel or not, though I appreciate the suggestion.
I agree that rose pictures are too often rose porn and too rarely helpful to someone who wants useful information. I would like to see more photographs of whole plants and more photos of plant parts for identification. Also much neglected are photos that show the other beauties of roses: some have good fall color; others interesting of beautiful canes or thorns. Also, though I think this isn't HMF's mission, I like to see photos of roses that show how they're used as part of a garden design. I like roses as part of an overall garden plan; pure rose gardens I generally find boring.
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