Showoffs!

'Carefree Spirit'

The last few roses to bloom for me are streaking into full display right now, so I thought I would take a few moments this morning to look through this year's pictures and identify those roses that I think really made a spectacle of themselves this year.  Not those roses that just bloomed well and often, but roses who literally bloomed so freely that you "couldn't stick a finger into them without hitting a bloom."  There were several of those, and it also struck me that most of the overachievers are also peaking right now, later blooming than most of their cousins.

'Carefree Spirit' is a relative youngster, in its 2nd full summer for me, but already it is living up to its promises. Carefree blooming and with a willing spirit, those are traits we all love in a rose.






The biggest overachiever in my garden may be my miniature climber 'Red Cascade'.  I took this picture this morning and its quality suffers as the eastern sunrise gives it an unnatural orange tint, but take a gander at a rose that is very well-named; a waterfall of bright red flowing over the limestone blocks.



'Red Cascade'

'Ballerina'

Hybrid musk 'Ballerina' is a timeless rose and provides me a more pastel-colored vision to salve the burns on my cornea, but she is still blooming like a champ right now.

'Jeanne Lavoie'

It is not so unusual for classy blooming miniature  'Jeanne Lavoie' to have a first bloom as flush as this one, but once again, she proves that she is a beautiful lass and a workhorse in the garden.  Five feet tall and growing, she should top that trellis by next year.

'American Pillar'

I always look to rambler 'American Pillar' to finish out the show for the first bloom cycle, and again this year, it isn't disappointing me.  This picture, taken this morning, reflects the fact that I didn't properly trim it and tie it up this year, but, regardless, this monster of a rose certainly has its ostentatious side.

'Hunter'

Among the more double-flowered and larger-flowered roses, I have to give special recognition here to red 'Hunter' on the right and bright pink 'Morden Centennial' below, both of which are now fading.  'Hunter' stands proudly among the young Monarda seedlings in the picture, and 'Morden Centennial' is now far past bloom, but they bloomed their heads off in their own times just to make me happy.  Both are always dependable roses for me but their early exhibition this year was more spectacular than I remember ever seeing either of them.  Thank you, girls, for adding a special splash to my rose season!  

'Morden Centennial'

As I scroll through my photos, there were many other well-blooming roses this year, the expected visual bounty from roses such as 'Champlaign' and 'Chuckles' and others, but the roses above were the cream of the crop in my rose parade.  What roses outdid their usual beauty for you this year?  What roses were your showoffs this year?

Digital Wind

I've been a mite perturbed lately with the quality of some of my posted pictures, worrying that I was having a hard time picking from pictures who all seemed to be a little blurry.  I was beginning to wonder, in fact,  if my autofocus settings had gone out of whack. 

But, taking about 80 pictures last night, the culprit was not my camera, but was all around me, spitting and thrusting, zigging and zagging my subjects.  No matter how fast I tried to force the shutter speed by opening the aperture, the wind was foiling my efforts. You want motion as part of your garden ambiance?  You want to capture motion in your photographs?  Come move next to me on the Flint Hills and try a few photos of your garden.

Look closely at the picture above, taken of the bright red rugosa-floribunda cross 'Hunter' in my front landscape bed.  Some branches, especially the stiffer variegated euonymus just behind the rose and a few of the flowers in the center, are perfectly still, while others are being thrown from side to side, just a blur on the photo.  And below, starting to bloom is the miniature climber 'Jeanne Lavoie',  the tied-up canes in the center in focus, while one of the new canes in the foreground is whipping side to side.  

There has been so much wind this Spring that I'm developing a persecution complex.  Several days, driving home from a day of work, I notice that the wind seems calm.  The first thing I do on those days, even before supper, is to grab a camera and rush to the garden, only there to find the wind seems to gust every time I aim the camera in anticipation of a shot. Even when there aren't random gusts, there is a constant steadier wind that has been interfering with my closeups day after day.  What evil lies in the hills and grass, that it can detect my presence in the garden and summon up a breeze to frustrate my photography?

Please, God, give me just a few calm days here in the Springtime during the rose bloom.  I know that August will come inevitably with 100F temperatures and a complete lack of breeze for weeks, but the pictures taken then will often still show motion as the flowers open and quickly dehydrate and shrivel.  I'm just asking for a windless day, say Saturday, when the roses are in peak bloom and the sun is perfect and the wind is still.  Please?