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I took a moment this morning to snap a picture of a Chaucer bloom. The fragrance is myrrh and to my nose smells soapy.
Over a half-inch of rain yesterday, so the blooms that are open are a bit "dewy" and nodding, but finally blooms are progressing -- a somewhat late year here, it seems. But here is the first bloom of one of my most beloved varieties ('Rose du Roi' of commerce, ex Vintage -- if it is that -- some question) with its zillion petals, fine architecture and scent, and a large bloom for this variety, at at least 4" diameter.
Jen, im so glad that you encouraged me to try Desiree. I love the sunrise/sunset color roses. Mine is looking healthy and ready to perform . yours is a stunner
Oh I'm enjoying this and looking forward to updates!
Wow I love them. I am adding Desiree to my list now because those colors are incredible.
I like threads like this one because I can scroll and see your garden and also learn the name of the roses instead of having to click on 20 different threads.
DD, A lot of farms around here do goat yoga. I havent been to any. I get enough goat gymnastics around here lol. People do seem to enjoy it. I dont know how much yoga would actually get done. If I even sit down around these goats, they are eating my hair, my clothes, babies (and some older ones who think they are still babies) jumping on my lap and trying to butt each other to try to get the most attention. They are like perpetual puppies lol.
Catspa, thanks so much for the link to my possible weed! I wrote down the info, and will do more research to compare. That one is currently in full shade in the Zygocactus pot, and is loving the moisture so much, it's sucking it away from the cactus... gotta remove it soon :-D
Sultry, I love goats. When I was in college and grad school, I worked for a vet, and one of them raised pygmy goats. She'd bring the babies in and let them run around the office after hours. I also occasionally took care of them when they went out of town, including milking them.
susan, that sounds like you had so much fun working for a vet. Babies running around the office is fun too. We had "house goats" this spring. I had 3 bottle babies (2 were from a mom with quads and one from a different dam, was rejected). I finally brought in a large dog kennel to keep them contained. They were crazy lol. I'm not a fan of walking out to the barn in the cold dark multiples times to feed them at night so brought them in.
I do most all of my own "vetting" here: delivering babies that get stuck, treating a lot of different illnesses, checking for parasites (using a microscope), vaccinations, etc. Anything beyond my knowlege, I have to go to the vets here which dont seem that educated about goats (most dont nowdays) horses: yes, cows: yes, goats: nope! lol
These are the 2 bottle babies from the quads getting warmed up. They loved to watch this electric fireplace and feel the heat blow on them after drinking their warm bottles.
The "reject" with the silly ears. He looked so much like a puppy we call him Puppy Chow.
10 days later same bloom. Getting close to the end but incredible bloom life.
I agree Moses! I also fell for the scam and life goes on tho hopefully wiser for it. I have a lot of buds at this point but very few blooms. I get up every morning extra early to drink coffee while walking around the garden before work, and inspect every bud to see if they look 1mm bigger, soooo exciting to me. Repeat after work of course. I hope you all have a wonderful spring this year and I can’t wait to see all your blooms.
Here is Transquility from Heirloom which a dear friend from this forum sent me as a surprise last year and it is blooming for the first time. There are many wonderful people here and I am sure once blooms get going everyone will be all excited and happy again and move on.
Spring is always hard for me. my roses have started growing and have already beem frozen. next week its suppsed to freeze and snow again, so today i went out and piled extra mulch over all my roses to attempt to keep the new growth from freezing again. I ordered a 6 pack of mini roses from home depot and have a couple of bare roots potted up that move in and out daily, and have gotten a couple blooms on those. love all my spring bulbs that have started putting on a show!
Moses , today was particularly sweet, the third day now the temperature has reached above 60 degrees in North Idaho. The birds are thrilled, so am I !
This morning Amara looked up at the top of the fence where the neighbor's sunflower on the other side hung it's heavy head last Fall, looking down at her . I hope they will plant another. She remembers everything; if I move a rock , the slightest thing, she notices.
When the CHEWY box arrived Amara knew what that meant.
To counteract the world's sad news or monotony , everyday I read a Hymn from an old duct taped Hymn book, ponder the morning and evening devotion from BlueLetterBible online, read from the KJV Bible, and listen to J Vernon McGee's corny sermon online at bedtime. A good loaf of bread from my favorite bakery to have toast with Amara doesn't hurt .
My roses won't bloom for months from now, and when they do it's sparse. Over the long wait I like to see what everyone on Roses Forum has blooming. I'm crazy over the seeds I am planting, some of my Grandmother's favorite flowers.
( image is from internet )
If anyone had told me decades ago that I would be so content as an old lady living a quiet life, I would not have believed them.
The front garden is going through something of an upgrade at the moment, started with a scraggly lawn…
Presently looking like:
very much a work in progress, but room for more roses 😆
Argh, typed a long post and it just vanished. So posting only a few pictures.
Cherry blossom
Apple blossom
Spiraea Arguta
Peony now fully opened.
Clematis early sensation
Tulipa Bronze Charm
My neighbors all compliment Lagerfeld, Secret and Lemon Spice for their scents. They all have good fragrance but also bloom so profusely there’s no mistaking they’re in bloom.
Lady Emma Hamilton and Margaret Merrill get my votes for their quality of fragrance. They don’t waft as much but i tend to agree that both have the best fragrance overall and both bloom really well. Jude is the better known Austin for fragrance but he doesn’t bloom as much per flush and the roses tend to be kinda blah one note for color. Lady Emma is much more interesting and has a better fragrance IMHO.
I also agree with Susan about jasmine, and add gardenias if you like a good challenge. When our gardenia and jasmine are in bloom it doesn’t matter what roses there are, you’ll never smell them over the jasmine and gardenias.
Lady Emma from last season…waiting for her massive spring flush right now.
Sultry this will be my first season with Madame Anisette. She has not bloomed for me yet, but she has buds! I can't wait to see how she performs. Did yours have a strong fragrance her first year?
Ryan this is my first season with Lady Emma Hamilton. She is putting on her first flush now. To me the fragrance is similar to Gruss an Coburg and English Garden. We have a large gardenia bush near our back door. I didn't prune it last year, so this seasons first flush should be amazing! The fragrance is locked in my memory from my childhood. I love that it wafts. I had a potted one near my front door but had to move it because the fragrance was too strong if you can believe that! Just where I couldn't breath. It was too much. So I moved it halfway across the yard haha.
Straw thank you for all of your fragrance notes! I'll have to try Comte de Chambord again. It was gorgeous and fragrant, but ended up suffering from Blackspot and a gigantic root gall. It was awful. The fragrance was memorable. I haven't smelled anything else like it since. I would love to try it again. It smelled exactly like a powder my grandmother used long ago.
My most deeply cupped Austin is Royal Jubilee. Took a while to get going, and didn't bloom much the first year, but so glad I kept her, she's been surprisingly good for an alba hybrid in my very warm climate. Excellent fragrance too!
Jude the Obscure, of course. Diane
Evelyn on a semi regular basis. She seems to produce a number of bloom structures.
Brother Cadfael
And even Boscobel on occasion.
Robert, my Jude might as well be a climber because it's large and very tall. But it's self supporting. I agree that Wollerton Old Hall does look very like Jude.
Thanks, Carol. Jude likes to have his pic taken.
Seaside, I agree with Carol that your Royal Jubilee is a lovely, very cupped shaped rose.
KS, great minds and all that. Jude is one cupped shaped rose, for sure.
Jude
Kristine, did you buy Jeri Jennings? If so, I can say that mine just does its thing with no trouble whatsoever. Planted it and have left it. Blooms a ton and looks great all the time.
I just posted these images of Mel's Heritage (purchased 2021 from Rogue Valley), but the whole post seems to have disappeared, apologies if it suddenly reappears. I am in Houston TX and my plant is doing terrifically well though this is the first year it has bloomed as profusely as this; I got enough bloom in past years to verify it was the correct rose however. I also have a Marianne that is healthy but has never bloomed at all; there may not be enough winter chill, but I have not given up on it. I do check for Barden roses every spring and fall. I also check for Rupert roses and have got a very lively specimen of Lauren this year. My Mel's heritage:
And next year you should see a huge difference in the bush's themself. The old saying, "first year sleep, second year creep, third year leap."
Purple Skyliner is scented and repeats. How healthy it may be where you are, I have no information about, but it's clean here on the Central Coast of California, repeats and has a nice scent.
My favorite fragrant very large climber is Mel’s Heritage. It also repeats very well.
probably 14 feet tall here spring flush in my old garden.
Spring color
Picture from later in the summer when it was high 90s
Another plant on a fence with heavy yearly prunning in my new garden
GableGarden, I’m very much looking forward to the arrival of Penelope Lively in the USA. That rich pink looks like it will show well in the intense light of my garden. I like the tight outer circle of petals.
Here is a few more. the varying shade of penelope are very interesting. Penelope rooted super easily as well last fall when I cut one of her canes off her and I had two root from her at the time.
Thank you!
TheGableGarden
Penelope looks gorgeous and I am looking forward to trying it when it gets released here. Her bloom form is exquisite.
Here a couple of more picture from today when it was cloudy and easier see the colors on these two.
I LOVE the contrast of the buds color to the flowers on Roald Dahl
i love seeing everyones spring flowers and the promise of more to come is so exciting.
Elena, prayers for a succesful surgery for your husband. He may be secretly happy that he has an out on all of the hole digging.
Today I planted a hardy hybiscus that has been in a pot for years and moved Francis Meiland in to a pot. His location has not ever done well with roses because it doesnt get sun until noon. I will have to plant something else there. My clematis actually does pretty well so maybe another clem or colorful annuals.
My posts kerp dissapearing so short and sweet.
Beautiful, bellegallica! Very heartwarming.
I'm all for giving things a try even if others give it a thumbs down. But I will add my thumbs down...Fair Bianca was very much a wimp for me and I got rid of it. I got Winchester Cathedral instead. Mine's own root and not a very strong plant but stronger than Fair Bianca and pretty I think.
Fair Bianca...yeah , it can be pretty.
Interesting bio's.. some quite amusing..
My first rose was a 1980's Austin called 'Perdita'.. and what a disaster. So started a love/not love relationship with those roses.. I was shocked to see the first bloom end up on the earth. Is this a rose? .. I then bought 'Alec's Red', and was immediately wow'd by it.
A book came into my possession called 'The Rose Expert' by D.G. Hessayon, and suddenly it all took off. I went to Sissinghurst and found there were a whole lot of other types of roses I just had to have. A truly fabulous 'Felicia' stole the show.
Now I have an eclectic mix, probably like most people.
I'd like to be paid for every wrong i.d. rose I've had... it would pay for a nice holiday in the Med. for sure.
What a wonderful thread! So nice to read everyone's stories. Thank you BenT for starting it!
When I was around 9 years old, my dad went on a work trip to Bulgaria and brought me back a tiny vial of pure rose oil. I treasured it and would sniff it before going to bed and dream of the fragrant fields of pink roses he'd told me about.
My mom did grow a couple of roses in the garden, but they weren't fragrant and I was never interested in them. So as a kid I had this notion that fragrant roses were something exotic and unattainable that only existed in Bulgaria.
It was only a few years ago that I started adding roses to my own garden, first a drugstore mini that was gifted to me, then Iceberg just because it was described as a tough plant. Only later did I randomly happen to notice a bunch of Austins in bloom at my local garden center... The range of scents blew me away, from fruity to myrrh to old rose. I went home with Heritage, Teasing Georgia, Wild Edric and Strawberry Hill.
I added Autumn Damask to my garden shortly afterwards, and when it bloomed I found that elusive scent from my childhood again. The circle was complete, but the rose journey had just begun!
My story is quite simple. Before moving to Seattle, I never even planted a single plant, let alone roses. My mother only grew some potted plants on the balcony of the condo, and watering them in the summer was really annoying. About six years ago, out of the blue I became curious about the varieties of the two fragrant roses came with the house, so I started searching online for information and found out that they were New Dawn and Etoile de Hollande, Cl.. I also discovered that roses are one of the very few shrubs that can bloom repeatedly, which made me want to try growing them in the ground. Our front and back yards were originally boring lawns and boxwood hedges, and DH was tired of mowing and watering the grass every week. In 2019, we decided to redo the yards. We removed all the lawn, boxwood, tons of Invasive plants (still fighting with Himalayan blackberries, morning glory, Sweet Autumn Clematis, Bermuda grass, etc. now), installed pavers, retaining wall, a irrigation system, and also built a small deck on the slope. From then on I walked on a road of no return. LOL. I now have about 200 roses (in fact I stopped counting over 150) and many native plants. Since our garden is small and shady, I'm always hunting for dry shade and dwarf versions/alpine plants, so there are also some rare plants here. I found that I love gardening, getting my hands into the soil, enjoying abundant colors in the garden, and even admiring the insects no matter they're bad or good. It’s such a joy to find a new hobby in retirement. It's almost like a second life.
New Dawn
Étoile de Hollande, Cl.
2017 backyard with our chihuahua Beta and a huge black walnut tree in the back.
Backyard 2023
lol :) :) Here's to not counting. :) :)
Oursteelers - hey, that's great to here!
Me, too,Melissa, and I agree that those of you who have access to free or cheap mulch are lucky indeed.
My garden is WAY too big for me to ever stay on top of weeding and mulching (and all the other jobs as well). I have a lot of neglected areas, that are completely overgrown with weeds and brambles. To try to get these somewhat under control, I use cardboard covered with organic matter -often just weeds that I've pulled out. Of course there are tons of weed seeds in this, but my main aim in these areas is to tame stuff like bindweed and brambles and their ilk-ya know, those garden bullies that want to take over everything. I do try to dig out dandelions and things like that.
In the areas which I am trying to keep reasonably cultivated I try to use leaves as much as possible, but even in those I wind up using weeds that I pulled out. As the soil improves, more areas are now covered with lush grass; I'm going to have to use cardboard on them, I think.
I hope eventually to plant more companions and groundcovers. I am very grateful that in some areas, volunteers are showing up-some plant that I think is a type of lamium is being a real hero. Vinca- covered areas are good, too, but bindweed does seem to be able to grow through that.Another large, wild area has now been taken over by lunaria, ivy, and arum italicum. This last one can be a pain in the bare bodkin, since it tries to invade areas where it is unwanted, but it is nice-looking. Once I tame the bramble-y area with cardboard, I hope to move some arum into that and let it take over.
In other words, I use whatever I can get! but never, never , never landscape fabric. I tried that , and it was a mess.
Photo of Distant Drums from last July
I’m the customer who blew the whistle on this situation. I’m happy to say I finally got all of my personal money back today after 22 days. What a lot of people are missing is the fact that a portion of the money this fraudulent business took in won’t be refunded. They simply don’t have it to refund. Nate paid off his long delinquent court costs in January of this year and was released from probation two years after he should have been. The court docket shows that he was facing a return to prison had he not paid. They also traveled to Texas and paid household expenses. Just as they did with the Lehigh Valley Rose Society where they used rose society funds for personal use, a percentage of what they took in was spent. Audit results and meeting notes reflect why Nate was removed. There will be people who don’t receive refunds. There will be true victims in this situation who will simply lose their money. If you doubt that fact, you really haven’t accepted the fact that this was a scam to begin with.
Only if the T shirts say
Ive been Scammed by
Garden Roses LLC