Unconditional Love

'Unconditional Love'

I have a new youngster in my garden, just a toddler starting to stretch out, and I swear, here, in front of witnesses, to give it 'Unconditional Love' forevermore.  I came across this 2003 introduction (registered as ARDwesternstar) while looking for Paul Barden roses on Rogue Valley's website and, unable to resist a bright red rose, I ordered and planted it this Spring.  'Unconditional Love' is a miniature Moss rose, and it has nice mossy buds to prove it. The first bloom flush, from a rose only a foot tall, was quite spectacular as you can see at the right.  Blooms are small, but very bright red and very double, and the color holds until the blooms drop free.  She's supposed to only grow two feet tall, so I have her placed in a prominent spot front and center of a new bed where she can return my adoration with blooming abandon.   I'll write more about her next year as she comes into adolescence.

(The "thistle" at the lower left, for those who are wondering, is a white prickly poppy, Argemone polyanthemos, that I have successfully gotten to grow from seed in this bed.  I'm trying to get them started self-seeding, so the prickly poppy and 'Unconditional Love' will just have to snuggle up together and get alone this summer).     

Daylily Drifting

'Night Embers' ?

As a gardener, one either seems to "get" daylilies, or one doesn't.   I've never been a rabid daylily fan myself, but their utility in a Kansas garden is such that most who garden in the Flint Hills will inevitably turn to daylilies as a way to fill border gaps with a minimum of fuss.

The real beauty of daylilies, however, is the versatility of their form and color and in the way my favorites change year to year.  Every time that I'm about ready to stop growing a particular color or form of daylily, when yet one more another look at a brassy orange or a muddy red ruffled flower leaves me near screaming, another season rolls around and I cease and desist in my extermination plans.  I sudddenly find the ugly ducklings are now the beautiful swans, and the daylilies that I liked last year are just not quite as appealing.

'Little Grapette'

I've drifted through love-hate phases that are likely common to many Hemerocallis growers.  The "hate the oranges and apricots" phase.  The "hmmm, the oranges look pretty fabulous this year" phase.  The "I'm wild about spider daylilies" phase.  The "subtle pinks and corals turn me on" phase.   The "eyed daylilies are the cats meow" phase. The "anything but Stella de Oro" phase.

This year, a poor year for daylilies in the dry Flint Hills, I'm in a "dark red and purple" phase.  Where 'Beautiful Edging' seems to have failed me, and where "Kwanso" is leaving me a little bit uneasy, the dark daylilies are standing out in sulky splendor.  'Little Grapette' is really purple, for once.  'Prairie Blue Eyes' is full of deep almost blue hues it has lacked in other years.  The dark reds are not quite black, but are certainly drawing me deeper into their mysteries than ever before. All this yet another example of nothing under God's creation lacking value.

So, just as a piece of advice from ProfessorRoush to reader, never turn down an offered daylily, no matter the color or form.  You may hate that brassy orange this year.  You may detest the short, stature and light yellow of 'Happy Returns'.  Apricot daylilies may leave you sick to your stomach, and purples with yellow throats may appear clownish in your garden this July.  But someday in the future, every daylily will have its moment in the sun, and you'll be glad they're still a part of your garden. I'm glad this year that the purples are here and I wish, once again this year, the oranges and 'Stella De Oro'  would die.  I can't just spade-prune the oranges, you understand, because Mrs. ProfessorRoush isn't as fickle in her daylily tastes and the oranges are her favorite every year.  When she wants me to plant more of them this year, I plan to smile, nod, buy more purples, and lie.

Striking Serendipity

A second blessed event 0f RAIN (!) occurred Wednesday night.  Short-lived, but a nice little downpour of a little over an hour yielded 2.6 inches of rain.  We may even be wetting the subsoil now!

I had just recovered from a day of clinics, eaten supper, perused the paper, and watched the evening talkies, when I realized that a decent storm front had assembled and was about 20 miles northwest of Manhattan, bearing down on us.  I've been waiting weeks for this opportunity, and, seizing the moment, I quickly donned garden shoes and ran out to spread a bag of alfalfa pellets on as many roses as I could.  I always like to spread the pellets just before a rain so they'll "uncompress", mold a bit, and be a little less likely to draw rabbits and rodents to the base of my roses. 

Now this is what I call lucky!

 After emptying the alfalfa bag, I grabbed my camera and went out to take a few pictures of the developing storm front.  And then, by a "stroke" of luck, I snapped the photo of lightning shown above.  The camera was hand-held and looking straight west, past my neighbor's mirthful sign and over his pasture to the western ridge.  Gorgeous, isn't it? And better yet if you could see it in the non-compressed form.  I've hoped for years to snap such a picture and here it is, mostly focused, straight, and as good as I could hope for.  God, in action, right on the Kansas prairie.

The rock sign, in case you're wondering, is at the entrance to my neighbor's property a few hundred feet to the west of my house, and it carries a slightly altered quotation from "Paint Your Wagon", both the name of a 1951 musical and the 1969 motion picture (Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood) inspired by it. The hit song of the musical and movie was They Call the Wind Maria, with "Maria" pronounced "Ma-rye-ah."  My neighbor, as you can guess, is a little bit of a character to love such a haunting song that he had a rock engraved with it.  I surmise that he didn't know the correct spelling of the song title, but then neither did Mariah Carey's parents, who, according to omniscient Wikipedia, named Ms. Carey after the song.

The actual lyrics are:

Away out here they got a name
For rain and wind and fire
The rain is Tess, the fire Joe,
And they call the wind Maria

This picture was taken looking due north from the front of my house, as the storm came in.

Isaac's Wife

'Madame Isaac Pereire'

While I'm on the subject of Old Garden Roses, one of the biggest mistakes that I've made in gardening (up until now) is to have waited this long before trying to grow 'Madame Isaac Pereire'.  This grand old lass is but a yearling in my garden, and her health, beauty and productivity is rapidly making me into an avid fan.

'Madame Isaac Pereire' is a dark pink Bourbon rose bred in France in 1881 by Armand Garcon.  The rose is named after Fanny Pereire, the wife of a prominent French banker, who used the inheritance after his death to honor his memory and simultaneously have this rose named after her.  In a very Continental twist, Pink Ladies and Crimson Gents reveals that Isaac Pereire was Fanny's uncle as well as her husband, a bit of salacious gossip that I somehow can't resist keeping in memory.

I was afraid of this rose, in my previous Zone 5B garden, because of her often-rating of Zone 6, and so I simply never applied Zonal Denial as a growing technique in her behalf.   But, come to find out, she did just fine as a one-summer-old unprotected shrub last Winter in my garden, and she's started back in this year without a pause.  Reputedly one of the most fragrant of all roses, I agree with the crowd about her strong bouquet, but I am insufficiently talented to confirm that tones of raspberry are prevalent in her ambiance as stated by others.  The very large and very double flowers are often quartered, and they hold their form as long or longer than most of the Bourbon class.  The bush form is sprawling, as you can see in the picture at the bottom of the blog, and I now understand first-hand why previous admirers like to stake her out in the garden to encourage bloom all along those long limbs.  I know that some consider her a short climber, with strong canes up to eight feet high, but I'm going to trim her as a shrub.  My specimen is a moderately vigorous bush, already this season pushing up 4 new large erect canes above the three foot level, and she's very healthy, with less than 10% of her unsprayed leaves bearing blackspot and with no noticeable defoliation.  I've seen no mildew on her matte green foliage here in Kansas.

She was sparing of her blooms in that first summer, and so, until recently, I believed her to be just another Bourbon, nothing special except exuding a decent fragrance.  What I hadn't anticipated are the rapid and bounteous rebloom cycles of this rose, making it the most prolific of my OGR's in terms of repeat flower production.  I'm encouraged now to look for 'Mme Ernst Calvat', a lighter pink sport with the same glorious fragrance.  The picture at the bottom is this year's first bloom cycle, but the second bloom cycle, now underway, is just as colorful and, because of the summer heat, even more fragrant.  One other secret I'll reveal about this rose;  this time of year, when Hybrid Tea and Floribunda blooms are bedraggled by wind, discolored by rain, and chewed by insects, my 'Mme Isaac Pereire' blooms still seem to be perfect, every one.  I don't know how she avoids the factors that disfigure the blooms of other roses, but she does.

I currently lack the knowledge and experience to tie down those long canes in gentle restraint, but perhaps this winter I'll borrow Fifty Shades of Grey from Mrs. ProfessorRoush and study it so that I can be properly prepared to restrain her (referring to 'Mme. Isaac Pereire') in the garden come next Spring.  This old gardener will try anything to encourage blooming of an Old Garden Rose.