A Better Side

'El Catala'

Wow, the onset of Fall surely changes our gardens, doesn't it?  It also sometimes makes me reassess my evaluation criteria and reevaluate my favorites.  Then again, perhaps my favorites don't change, but it is now, in the cooler temperatures, that I realize that all roses, just like humans, have their good and bad moments.  Sometimes they are a balled-up, crinkly mess, and sometimes, they just shine.  You just have to find the best conditions to develop each one, human or rose.

'El Catala'

Take, for example 'El Catala'.  I haven't been crazy about the performance I've gotten out of this rose all summer, but right now, in the cool days and cold nights, it is the star of its bed. I was wrong about him, wasn't I?  Take a look at this bicolored floral hunk to the left and above.  Completely scrumptious right now,  isn't he?

'Charlotte Brownell'

And look at how the colder temperatures bring out the blush in the cheeks of 'Charlotte Brownell'.  Amazing, isn't it, how a girl can be blushing and brazen at the same time?



'Freckles'

Just as the sun brings out the freckles in a young girls face, the claret markings of 'Freckles' are always enhanced by a little cold weather as well.  I'm learning that Griffith Buck had a number of these subtly streaked roses and I'm trying to grow a few more right now.

'Garden Party'

If I wasn't expecting a garden party after the heat of summer, 'Garden Party' is set on proving me wrong.  My 'Garden Party' struggles and struggles, a common affliction for many modern hybrid teas in this area, but coming out of summer, she's putting out these creamy white, perfect blossoms by the handful every day.



When I talk about favorites, though, there's always one rose whose beauty is never outdone; the everlasting 'Queen Elizabeth'.  When I want a picture of a perfect bud form, I can always count on the Queen to come through for me.

But then, as I pointed out, there is always 'Hope for Humanity', isn't there?  I can't imagine a more perfect cluster of dark red blooms, each vibrating deeply with life and hope.

 

'Hope for Humanity'

I've got quite a colorful landscape right now, this perfect time of early Fall, but sadly it all ends tonight.  I've watched the forecast all week, starting at a prediction of 32F tonight when I first looked, and then dropping steadily each time I checked it.  This morning, the prediction is for 25F tonight, so I know that I'm going to see a hard freeze and my garden is over.  I'm ready for it, though, the baby roses are all tucked into cloches and the grass has been mowed for the final time.  But I'm also not ready for it.  There are hundreds of beautiful roses like these right now and I'm trying to get half of Manhattan to come by and cut some today.  Somebody might as well benefit from a few more moments of beauty.

Garden Literature Goes To Pot

Dear friends, just as there is no hiding the fact that ProfessorRoush is a rose nut, there is also no suspense to the revelation that I am an entrenched bibliophile.  My love of printed and bound material stretches far back into my childhood, to that happy time when I was still an "only" child and had to find ways to occupy myself.  While burdened now with middle-age, a sister, a wife, and children, I continue to feel comforted with the feel of paper and printed letters, the smell of new ink and glue.  I aspire to become the last person on the planet to purchase a Kindle or Nook.

My long worship of books and growing interest in gardening has, for the past twenty years or so, connected in that genre we know as garden literature, in the words of Penelope Hobhouse and Christopher Lloyd and Lauren Springer-Ogden.  I have discovered natural gardening with Sara Stein, delighted in the philosophical ramblings of Michael Pollan, grown old with Sydney Eddison and grumbled with Henry Mitchell.  I've plotted spousal demise with Amy Stewart and searched for old roses with Thomas Christopher. 

All that, I fear, is disappearing.  Literally, it seems to be going to pot.  Marijuana.  Mary Jane, reefer, and cannabis.  Call it what you want, I was shocked, visiting a large national book chain, to realize that what was previously eight shelves of fascinating garden literature is now four shelves, two of them composed entirely of books about growing, marketing, or self-medicating with marijuana.  I counted 87 different books on pot cultivation, with such imaginative titles as Marijuana 101, Organic Marijuana, Everything Marijuana, and the Marijuana Garden Saver.  The Big Book of Buds is not about roses, much to my chagrin.  Only one even looked mildly interesting to me, Super Charged; How Outlaws, Hippies and Scientists Reinvented Marijuana, probably because it was more science and history-oriented rather than a how-to-grow-to-get-high-at-home manual.  I didn't buy it for fear someone might see it laying around our home.

Can the drive for all these new books about marijuana really be sales-based?  I don't see these on the bookshelves of friends, sitting on tables of garage sales, or promoted in bestseller lists.  Perhaps the gray-haired members of my daylily club are only pretending to grow hemerocallis in my presence, but pass the potato bong when I'm not around.  Somehow, somewhere, are the same clueless editors and booksellers just surmising that these are what the public wants?  The same editors that contract good writers to produce lame and repetitious books of landscaping dumbed down for the homeowner, or to write the 200th tome cautioning against over-watering houseplants (which currently comprise the other two gardening shelves in the store)?  Would Scotts, Bayer, and other companies grow richer if they forgot about lawn care and rose chemicals and concentrated their marketing on hydroponic fertilizer and gro-lamps aimed to entice that little extra buzz out of hemp?

Don't answer that last question. It was rhetorical, not a suggestion for improvement.

I'm asking instead that all gardeners, from the lowliest bean planters to topiary artists extraordinaire, all of us vote with our pocketbooks.  Buy works authored by Mirabel Osler and Beverley Nichols and Helen Dillon and Henry Mitchell.  Read about the gardens of others, old and new, green and growing, famous or banal.  Become a fan of organic gardening, water gardening or prairie gardening.  Shun the Siren call of cannabis and read to garden for flowers and food! 

Terrific Teasers

'Dolly's Forever Rose'

I know that some of my readers follow Garden Musings because you enjoy following my foibles with Mrs. ProfessorRoush, others because you like the dry humor or the rambling rants, some that want to commiserate with my tribulations in my Kansas garden, and still more of you just because you never know what I'm going to touch on next.  But then too, some few are the rabid rosarians, the true believers, waiting to see what I'm growing out here in the Kansas hell-land.

It is to the latter group that I'm dedicating this posting.  Several new little pretties have responded to the cooler September temperatures and I thought I would throw out a few little teasers in advance of future rose posts.  I'll let all these little guys get bigger, probably into late next season, before I show you their full glory, but I'm so excited that I just can't keep them secret.

'Dolly's Forever'

One dynamite little beauty with an eye-popping color combination is the Paul Barden-bred 'Dolly's Forever Rose' (upper right).  I've been growing her since early this past Spring and she has randomly bloomed throughout the worst of Summer, now finally a foot tall and blooming her skirts off.  I've become attached to checking on this little stunner and I'm a little worried about her hardiness, so I'm going to cover her up good when the cold weather comes. This little offspring of 'Scarlet Moss' and a complex seedling including 'Angel Face' is definitely going to bring some fire into her bed if she makes it to next summer..

'Vanguard'

'Vanguard' is another rose that has bloomed several times this season and is now stretching for the sky.  At 4 months old, this little Rugosa cross has already topped 2 feet and she has a strong fragrance to draw you down to the ground with her.  The pinkish-orangish-bluish blossoms should add a few more petals as she grows, and her flowers are more delicate than most Rugosa's, but she's certainly proved herself tough enough for a spot in my garden.  One oddity;  she's supposed to be a once-bloomer according to helpmefind.com but Rogue Valley Roses lists her as a reblooming rose and certainly, my 'Vanguard' has been freely spreading her beauty over the entire season.

'Dragon's Blood'



Another Barden rose that I'm tickled to grow is 'Dragon's Blood'.  This russet floribunda has small individual blooms, but the orange-red-rust color is eye-catching.  Freely-blooming and covered in healthy foliage, I placed 'Dragon's Blood' in a prime place for visitors.  At a prominent corner, they can watch the dusty hues (see the photo below) of each petal as they age and darken.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Dragon's Blood'

 

 

 

 

 

Well, there you have them;  a few glimpses of next year's tantalizing offerings.  Are you teased enough yet to stay tuned?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arachnophobic Angst

On general principles, I'm a "leave-me-alone-and-I'll-leave-you-alone" kind of gardener (except, of course, when it comes to snakes).  Spiders, insects, newts, and crawly things of all kind get a pass in my garden until they cause me bodily harm or inflict horticultural havoc on my plants.  I haven't, as I recall, used a single dose of insecticide, organic or otherwise, in my perennial garden all year (although I'm not quite so innocent when it comes to my vegetable garden).  You can see the evidence for my benevolence frequently in this blog, since many rose photos hide an insect or two visible only for their protruding legs or antennae. 

But truth be told, the situation is different when it comes to the domestic side of the household.  Mrs. ProfessorRoush and her diminutive clone have an irrational fear and hatred of spiders in and around the house.  I've been summoned from as far as a mile away by screams emanating from trapped female humans in showers, laundries, and basements.  Sometimes, I can't even hear them but I see the dog startle at the hypersonic pitch.  Consequently, as free as my outer garden perimeter is from insecticides, inside my house there exists a toxic chemical wasteland of armageddic proportions.  If it scuttles, it gets sprayed.  If it hides in corners or along baseboards or in the ceiling, it gets sprayed.  Sometimes I think the spraying commences at the merest extrasensory wisp of a chitinous thought of invasion.  I'm expecting the EPA to declare my house a SuperFund site at their first examination.

I naively thought, with the development of long-acting insecticides promising "year-long" residual activity, that at least my own fears of neurologic side-effects might be alleviated, but alas, after spraying only a couple of months ago, I was recently informed that the spiders have returned.  Not in live form, mind you, but as crinkled skeletal remains. Evidently, dried carcasses with eight appendages are viewed as evidence of a marauding population and mass genocide is immediately implemented.  My feeble attempts to point out that dead spiders are an indication that the toxins are working are for naught.  The Huns are at the Wall.

That's why I feel sorry for the little fellow pictured on this page.  I'm no entomologist (or is it an arachnologist?) so I can't identify this individual other than lumping him as a "house spider who spins webs," but I doubt he intends any mischief other than catching a few random flies above the barbecue.  Unfortunately for him, he chose to set up shop, as you can see at the right above, in the window above our kitchen sink, where Mrs. ProfessorRoush has to stare at him daily as she tries to appreciate the view of the valley towards town.   If he'd asked me, I could have told him that such "in-your-face" politics were not a wise move when there's a madwoman nearby with her finger on the nuclear trigger.  This guy's days are numbered and I'm sure he's going to disappear soon to rest next to Jimmy Hoffa, with only me to mourn him between my bouts of spastic twitches.