High Hopes for Marie

As a late summer treat, I finally got a semi-decent, but still a bit blurry, picture of a bloom from a rose that intrigues me right now.  Let me introduce you to a fairly rare rose in the States, the now-heirloom hybrid tea 'Mme. Marie Curie'.

I received this rose last fall as a free rose in a shipment from Rogue Valley Roses, and it went into my "Barden" bed along with a number of Paul Barden's Gallica creations.  It was a fairly weak looking specimen and I knew it was a Hybrid Tea, just marginally hardy in this climate, so I coddled it all winter long with one of my then-new glass cloches.  Through this hot dry summer, it struggled a bit, giving me a hint of a beautiful yellow bloom every once in awhile, but never appearing healthy until lately, as it sent up the two nice strong canes pictured below.  I hope it has turned the corner for me.

'Mme Marie Curie' is a 1942 rose bred by Gaujard of France, and it is known as 'Quebec' in Europe.  It was introduced into the US by Jackson and Perkins in 1943 with the name 'Mme Marie Curie', and it was a winner of an AARS award in 1944.  It bears a large, 5 inch, Hybrid Tea-form bloom of about 25 petals and although the first blooms have been fleeting and small for me, I have noticed that the petals don't fade to light yellow as most yellow roses do, but they dry and remain a very vivid bright yellow.  HelpMeFind only lists this rose as hardy to Zone 6B, so it may take some special winter care in my area, but I'm willing to provide it for a few years until I fall in or out of love with this rose.

My yellow beauty here is named for the discoverer of radium and polonium, the widowed and famed Polish-French scientist Marie Curie.  I remember reading as a boy about Madame Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel, and the  the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences.  This rose obviously has a high standard to live up to.  You need to be careful searching for this rose on the Internet, nowever.  Enter only "Madame Curie" and "rose" and you get a 1997-vintage orange and pink floribunda of that name that is not nearly as attractive as the pure yellow of the older Hybrid Tea.  I also found a white Japanese-bred climber named, in English, "Marie Curie IYC2011" that seems to be recently introduced.  I suppose we'll someday need a brochure to separate the roses named for this icon of early 20th Century science.  A collector's bed of roses named for Marie Curie, anyone?

(Got to run now.  The younger version of Mrs. ProfessorRoush has just darted into the room, needing the family computer pronto.  Can't a man blog in peace?) 

Story of My Summer

Before anyone panics, NO, this is not a picture of a KSU-physics-department nuclear test cloud over the Jayhawk's football stadium in Lawrence.

But as a rather useful illustration of the frustration that is gardening in the Flint Hills,for all of those who don't live in Kansas, I give you the picture below, snapped on my way home from work on September 9th. 




























I had just gone north from the Vet School, took one look due west, and immediately grabbed my trusty "Jeep" camera, the Nikon CoolPix L22 cheapo that I keep in the glove compartment, and pulled over.  This random rain cloud, the first actual rain hitting the ground that I'd seen in over a month, is sitting just to the south of my house, which is just over the hill on the western horizon at approximately the right hand edge of the cloud.  By the time I'd gotten home 5 minutes later, the cloud had moved on, leaving a 500 foot or so wide sprinkle path over my neighbor's driveway and the pasture between us. 

It was another week before we finally got a decent rain, an all-night soaker that provided us a solid inch of rain to wet the topsoil down four inches or so.  It's an odd feeling to dig down into the dirt of my garden right now; moist soil for the first few inches, and then dry subsoil as far down as my shovel will reach.

Welcome to the Flint Hill's my friends...welcome to the Flint Hills, the most damnable excuse for a mid-Continental climate evident to gardening civilization.

Beds in the Sun III

To finish off my saga of the backyard bed layout requested by GaiaGardener, I'm moving to another picture, a continuation of the previous beds showing the beds laying to the south-west corner of that area.  The previous posts on this subject were Beds in the Sun and Beds in the Sun II.

I've already mentioned the bed labeled "J", my "Barden Bed" which is a group of 12 roses, mostly Paul Barden creations obtained commercially from Rogue Valley roses.  I've added a number of new daylily starts to the outside of this bed, hopefully to bloom after these once-blooming gallica and alba creations are long done.

Bed K is a long border, my "Viburnum Bed" the third oldest in the garden, composed mostly of mixed shrub roses and about 8 viburnums in full sun.  People always seem surprised to see the viburnums growing in full sun here, but they are troublefree in this location. It is anchored on the East (left) side by an 'Arnold's Red' Bush Honeysuckle, and on the West (right) side by a 'Golden Spirit' smoketree, the latter now 5 years old and about 7 feet tall.  Several Old Garden Roses are placed here, including 'Celestial', 'Duchess de Montebello', 'Charles de Mills', and 'Rosa Mundi.'  There are also a few assorted other roses, including the rugosa 'Sir Thomas Lipton', 'Dornroschen', and Buck roses 'Carefree Beauty', 'Griff's Red', 'Freckles', and 'April Moon'.  A couple of nice grasses, Panicum 'Northwind', and Miscanthus sinensis 'purpurascens', along with a Sumac 'Tiger Eyes', provide some late Fall color along with the viburnums.

Bed L is my most formal bed, composed of nothing but Buck roses, English roses, Modern Shrub roses, and a very few Floribundas and Hybrid Teas.  If it's a modern hybrid-tea-like rose, it is likely in this bed, surrounding a concrete bench.  There are a few OGR's here as well, 'Leda',  'Variegata di Bologna', and 'Henri Martin' as well.  There are, at last count 58 living roses in this bed.

Bed M is a long bed laying among the three taller beds and it is the oldest of what were my mixed iris and daylily beds.  Here again, the iris keep fading out, overwhelmed by the daylilies, and so I'm converting the bed to daylilies only.  I mow this one off every fall as mentioned in previous posts.

The last of these beds, Bed N, is my "Rose Berm" and it is the oldest bed in this part of the garden.  It was created 10 years ago by a gift from my mother of two truckloads of topsoil spread in a long hump, so it is mostly a raised berm about 2 feet higher than the surrounding prairie.  Along with the topsoil, I got lots of bindweed seed that I have to continually watch for even a decade later.  This bed is anchored by a 'Purple Fringe' smokebush at one end and a 'Blue Bird' Hibicus syriacus at the other, but otherwise there are about 30 roses in the bed, ranging from several Canadian Roses such as 'Alexander MacKensie' and 'Morden Ruby', to Old Garden Roses such as Bourbon 'Louise Odier' and Damask 'Madame Hardy', and even a couple of (gasp) Knockout's; 'Double Red', and 'Double Pink'. My Rosa eglanteria is here, as well as one of my two 'Austrian Copper' bushes, and a 'Harison's Yellow'.

So that's it, my main garden.  I'm going to wait awhile and talk about other things, but eventually I'll give you an overall glimpse of my front, back, and side landscaping beds.   Hope this helps place things I've mentioned in this blog!