The Future's so Bright, I Gotta Wear Stripes

'Variegata di Bologna'

Well, things are looking up as far as gardening in Kansas goes, and ProfessorRoush is breathing a little easier.  I was mowing today and I could barely keep mowing, tempted to stop every few feet and take photos.  A number of roses are blooming profusely, and I really wasn't sure what to show you first. I am storing up photos and stories for later blog entries, but I'm so proud of my striped roses, particularly a couple of relative new ones, that I simply must do that group first.

'Centifolia variegata'

Of course, the fragrant  Bourbon 'Variegata di Bologna' featured in the top photo here, is a personal favorite and blooming right now, but I really want to focus on two newer (to me) rose varieties.  Rosa ‘Centifolia variegata' or ‘Village Maid’, pictured at left, is a Centifolia rose (obviously, from the name) that is reliably cane hardy for me.  She is three years old in my garden and blooming profusely this year at the end of arching 5 foot canes that tend to sprawl everywhere, resembling an adolescent teenager in my garden.

'Centifolia variegata'

Like many Old Garden Roses whose provenance has been lost to history (she was known in France before 1817), she has many aliases, but 'Village Maid' seems to me to best fit her nature and beauty (her registered name is the uninspiring  'Centifolia variegata').  All those aliases refer to these fully double, extremely fragrant mottled blooms of very light pink and white that look fragile but are standing up well in the recent heat wave.  I will trim her hard this year after she blooms in an attempt to make her more compact and mature, but I hope she feels welcome and is here to stay in my garden.

'Georges Vibert'

My second "new" bi-colored rose is the more upright and stately ‘Georges Vibert'.  Georges, as we'll refer to him here, is a Gallica who stands about 3 feet tall and is vase-shaped, stiff and sturdy in appearance.   I labeled Georges as "new", but I was surprised, looking him up, that I planted him in 2017, nearly a decade back.  He is not a very vigorous rose in my garden, and he was always on the brink of death in his early years, but he is finally blooming well and looking more healthy for me this year.  

'Georges Vibert'

'Georges Vibert' was bred by Robert, Français-André in France and introduced 1853.  Another once-blooming rose, he has vivid violet-red streaking in the blossoms against a very light pink background.  The full blooms are only lightly-scented, and they open flat at maturity to a somewhat disorganized but still beautiful blossom.   He is cane-hardy and blackspot free in my Zone 5 garden. 

'Spanish Rhapsody'

I could keep going on more striped roses, such as the gorgeous Griffith Buck-bred 'Spanish Rhapsody', blooming now and pictured at left, but we'll move on to other roses in the next post.  Just know, all you readers, that I still treasure all my striped or mottled roses, and many still persist, unafflicted by rose rosette disease and the many other pests and tribulations, in my garden.

Old Friends and New

'Topaz Jewel', risen from the muck

While ProfessorRoush's exterior surfaces are a bit "dampened" by all the rain we've been getting, he was still overjoyed today to see the little bit of "sunshine" to the right, re-entering his garden on a cloudy day after so many years of absence.  This is 'Topaz Jewel', planted in 2009, a nice rose in a lousy spot. Blasted by winter, forage for Japanese beetles, she has survived all that and risen again.  She has not bloomed in my garden for the past two years, and in 2017, in fact, I wrote her off as extinct when I found nothing but a dry corpse of stems in her stead.  Then, last year, among the weeds and the Rosa Mundi that I let spread a little too much in this area during my drought-garden ennui, there was some rose foliage here that looked slightly different than R. mundi, a little lighter green, and a little rougher leaf texture.  This spring there was a start of a stronger growth, now more visibly rugose, and I've been holding my breath for months as this bud grew and grew and matured during the rain until two days ago, the sepals began to spread and showed this brilliant yellow hue, confirming that 'Topaz Jewel' had survived against all odds.  In the midst of all the death from Rose Rosette Disease in my garden, one small bit of rugosa resistance is all I really need to lift me as high as the storm clouds around central Kansas.

In fact, my entire rose garden area is a swamp, a clay-based water basin of pure ooze.  It is placed on a slight slope behind the house, but still, this morning, after an inch of rain Saturday and another 3/4's inch last night, you can see the water standing next to this bed right in front of 'Topaz Jewel' in the photo to the left.  I planted a couple of new roses yesterday in a bed near here, slipping and sliding them into their designated spots, and found that if you dig a hole 6 inches deep anywhere in these garden beds, it will fill instantly with water.  I will probably have nightmares tonight of all the rose roots screaming for oxygen in the yard while I helplessly listen to the storms forecast to visit once again.  'Topaz Jewel' and her immediate neighbors are at least in a raised berm, probably their only salvation at present.


New roses are beginning to bloom this year, however, to fill in the gaps from RRD and to keep my hopes "afloat."  The striped rose pictured at the right, in keeping with my switch to RRD-resistant Hybrid Rugosas and Old Garden Roses, was planted just last year, and today was the first bloom in my garden of Mr. 'Georges Vibert'.  Mr. Vibert, or Georges as I will affectionately call him, is an 1853 Gallica bred by M. Robert of France.  You all know my weakness for striped roses, and this one seemed like an obvious choice to fill in a gap in both my garden beds and in my soul.  I'm hopeful for Georges continued health and vitality in my garden, especially since helpmefind/roses states that the Montreal Botanical Garden rated it as one of it's most disease resistant roses in 1998.

I should finish by apologizing for being unable to resist the water-referencing puns I've "sprinkled" through this entry.  Puns, though painful to the reader, are often, in my opinion, just one manifestation of a tormented writing soul, or, more specifically in my case, one "drowning" in an unusually wet season.