Anguish and Joy

Yes, I know that I haven't posted in several days.  No big excuses here, though.  When last Tuesday came around, and the thermometer crossed back over the 100F mark and stayed there through yesterday, I just couldn't face my garden or anything to do with it.  Aside from watering a few potted plants and the surviving roses of the Heirloom Roses shipment from a few weeks back, I hibernated and dreamed of winter.

And dreamed of rain.  We haven't had over 2/10ths of rain in the past month and things are beyond drying up, they're dry.  I haven't done more than mow the edges of the blacktop (where the crabgrass always grows fastest) in a month, so I guess the positive side is that I haven't been sitting on a roaring mower every week.   Last weekend, knowing that summer wasn't saying goodbye without another heat wave, I watered many of the beds, feeling guilty that I was breaking my "no extra water" rule but wanting to protect the  roses, and then I withdrew from the garden and garden thoughts.  Read some trashy vampire-mystery novels (James Butcher and Laura Hamilton) and pretended I was in Alaska.

But, as the psalmist wrote "...Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30:5).   Temperatures today (Saturday) in the low 90's are supposed to lead to daytime highs in the 70's through the weekend and a 40% chance for rain tonight.  I don't hold much hope for the rain, since I've seen several weeks of 30% chances come and go, but at least the temperatures will mean that whatever moisture gets added to the garden might stay around more than 30 minutes.

I'll leave you with this; one of my favorite pictures of my now-grown son.  He was born in Wisconsin but we moved here shortly before his first birthday, and in this picture, taken at about 1 1/2 or 2 years of age (he walked before he was 9 months old), he proved himself to be quickly adapting to Kansas weather as he was rejoicing in a surprise shower after a long hot dry period.  I remember I could hardly get him to hold still from slapping those bare feet down in the puddles on the still-warm concrete.   I don't think the Batman shirt would fit me, but this is otherwise exactly what I plan to do the next time it rains here, if it ever rains here again.
   

Sweet Fragrance Abounds

'Sweet Fragrance', 8/26/11

In contrast to my last, less than glowing post about 'April Moon', let me show you a rose that HAS earned a permanent spot in my landscape.  A local nursery that I frequent, Lee Creek Gardens, has a number of the  Bailey Nursery "Easy Elegance(tm)" rose offerings, and several years ago I picked up three of them to try out.  The best of these, I believe, has turned out to be 'Sweet Fragrance', a coral/apricot rose that is aptly named for the sweetly fragrant blossoms.


'Sweet Fragrance' (registered as 'BAInce') blooms continually in my garden, but the sometimes occasional blossoms are bordered by four to five waves of blooms during the season.  She is a Ping Lim-bred rose, introduced in the US by Bailey Nurseries in 2007.  The picture at the right was taken recently during the 4th bloom phase of this summer, still quite prolific despite just coming out of the recent heat wave.  I did not edit or crop the picture at all, it is straight from the camera (except for some compression), as flower-filled as it was taken.  Buds of 'Sweet Fragrance' are hybrid-tea-shaped, but open into somewhat unorganized double blossoms in large clusters that have tones of yellow, orange, coral, pink and apricot all mixed together.  The older the blossom, the pinker it becomes.  The three foot high shrub has had no dieback in three winters and it needs no spray here in Kansas to keep it healthy. 'Sweet Fragrance' was awarded Portland's Best Grandiflora in 2008 and again in 2010.

Ping Lim has only recently come to my attention, but he is already an acclaimed rose hybridizer, with three All American Rose Selections ('Daydream', 'Love and Peace', and 'Rainbow Sorbet') to his credit.  On his website home page, http://www.rosesbyping.com/, there is a fabulous picture of a cream pink and yellow 2012 introduction named 'Music Box' that has me drooling already. Please don't go look at i,t because I'm afraid everyone will want one and they'll be sold out before I find one.

Easy Elegance(tm) roses are all grown on their own roots, and they came to me potted as fairly large plants compared to most marketed own root roses.  All three of the varieties I grow are vigorous and healthy, and sooner or later I'll blog about the rest of them.  But for now, search out 'Sweet Fragrance' to add a peachy note of color and fragrance to your garden.

Too Hot for April Moon

Batten down the hatches! Unusually for me, I'm not going to try to spin any perfect yarn about my love for the rose in today's blog.  Dr. Griffith Buck's 'April Moon' is one of those roses that I've tolerated, but that has yet to grow on me.  It isn't that it is terribly diseased, extremely ugly, or a sparse bloomer, it is simply never quite lived up to my expectations for it.

'April Moon', introduced in 1984, is officially described as a "medium yellow shrub", with "lemon yellow buds" tinted red, opening to double (25-30 petal) blooms of lemon yellow (color code RHSCC 14C).  Here's a neat note;  according to helpmefind.com, 'April Moon' has "28-30 petals.....large double (17-25) petals) bloom form."  Let's make up our minds, shall we?  Is it 30 petals or 17?   'April Moon' is supposed to grow 3 foot tall and four feet wide and have a sweet fragrance.  It was a cross of 'Serendipity' with a seedling of 'Tickled Pink' and 'Maytime'.    

So what is my problem with 'April Moon'?  Let me count the ways.  First, I would never in a million years have called her lemon yellow.  The only blossoms I ever see are white with maybe the mildest yellow tinge.  Perhaps she just can't stand the summer heat in Kansas.   Buck's 'Prairie Harvest' is a much better yellow from that breeding program, if still a very light yellow one.  Second, the rose is barely double in my eyes, seldom reaching 20 petals. And it opens so fast that I've never been able to photograph a bloom in that "half-open" phase.  It seems to be tightly wound in bud one day and then fully open the next.  It has no fragrance that I can find, and three years old, my plant has barely made it to two feet high, let alone three.  In fact, my 'April Moon' is so different from descriptions that I wonder if I was sent the right rose when purchased.

Are there positives about this rose?  Yes, of course there are.  It does seem to be completely hardy without dieback in my Zone 5b climate, and it has good disease resistance.  The photos on this page were taken recently and you can see from the healthy foliage that blackspot is not an issue on this rose (remember that I don't spray for fungal disease in my garden).  The bloom does repeat well throughout the growing season. Most importantly, if you are the sort of rosarian that likes to rave about golden stamens, then you may like this rose because it has stamens in spades.  Me, I'm not ready to spade-prune this rose, but so far, it has been a poor sister to 'Prairie Harvest'. 

Jens Munk mystery cont.

Well, I stuck to the plan and exhumed my dead Jens Munk rose.

I have to be truthful here and admit that I did not carefully follow and dig around each separate root to definitively examine the entire root ball.  In engineering terms, what I did would be described as considering all available environmental factors and determining that the best way to facilitate a solution to the issue was to apply increasing lateral mechanical force to an anchored beam, resulting in a separation of the fauna/soil interface. To the rest of us, it means that on a hot (97F) day, with the Kansas sun bearing down on me, the best I could manage before my body turned to dust was to dig out the soil around the crown of the plant to a depth of 3 inches and encircle it with a really thick rope.  I then tied said rope to the trailer hitch ball on my Jeep, jumped into the air-conditioned Jeep,  put it in first gear, and jammed the accelerator down until I ripped the plant out of the ground.  That is why the remaining roots look so short in the picture to the right.

I learned nothing, essentially.  I could not determine any earthly reason why Jens Munk died.  When you look closely at the picture above, you can see that what I really had here was two plants, the plant at the left of the above picture that died first, and the plant to the right of the picture that recently died.  I cleaved them apart with an axe, as you can see at the left, and examined the cut surface, as you can see below.  Yes, there was a little dirt in the center, but the wood and roots all around that area were firm and showed no evidence of rot.  Cutting into the crown above this with a saw demonstrated no hollow areas of rot or borer damage. There were no cankers or below-ground mushrooms growing here.  No chewed away roots or tunnels running into the prairie soil.  The soil around these roots was moist (but not too moist) and had a pH of 6.4, well below the prairie soil that exists outside my mulched beds, which normally runs in the pH 7.2 range.

So, I can't tell you that I learned anything to shed light on the apparent suicide of Jens Munk.  I have a small, actually a miniscule hope that one of the pieces of roots, now deprived of its above ground Master, will be healthy enough and have enough stored energy to put out a new stem of its own.  Hope, but little faith.  But I'm willing to give it some time, until next Spring perhaps, to see if a miracle will occur.  Then, I'll follow my usual pattern and plant something else in this spot, and shortly thereafter I'm sure that I'll find that Jens Munk is growing again, about one foot to the side of where I just placed the new rose.  It has happened to me that way time and again, but I'm quite willing to accept tempting the Fates, if that is the price of adding Jens Munk to my garden again.