Yay!!!

I can't wait to see the catalog! I attended last year for the first time. Such an amazing resource & such a wonderful place! (Although, after seeing what White Maman Cochet can do when given ample room, I realized the space I've allotted to that plant is far too skimpy!)

This garden really is awesome - I don't know of another garden in Northern California that displays OGRs so splendidly. Now, if there IS another one, I want to know ASAP!

As soon as the catalog is available, I'll be working my poor fingers to the bone researching all the varieties & trying to whittle down my wish list.

Yahoo!

I will be there! I have my wish list and hope that they are the ones that were propagated...

See you soon,

Daun

We'll see you all there!

Drat!! I tried to clear a hole in my schedule to make it to the open garden and sale this year ... but it's not going to happen. Would it be inappropriate to ask someone to act as my proxy -- to buy roses for me and ship them to Virginia? If it's not okay, I'll just mope.

Connie

Wouldn't miss it!

It's seemed like a long winter, and I don't know when I've looked forward to ANYTHING as much as I am that weekend.

Connie, if you can get someone to buy for you, and ship, I can't imagine anyone could possibly object.

Jeri

Please, somebody be Connie's proxy. I hate so see someone with such a bright smile mope. (Plus it will get new plants here on the East coast)

Kathy

Jeri thank you very much for your post and again the hard work which goes into this undertaking.

I was almost afraid to open this post only to find out a link to the catalog might not be posted. But when I saw your cheerful pictures and felt your excitement that made it all better. This being my first time to attend this event I literally cannot wait. I keep updating my poor husband on how close April 18th is getting:)

You will post again when the catalog is available if you have time? Thank you!

Kate

Oh YES!
I will definitely post when the catalog is up and available.

I have already heard that a few folks are joining us from out of state this year, and I'm just as happy as I can be.
DH and I have already made a reservation for the RV Park out at the CalExpo Fairgrounds, even.

:-)

Jeri

Larry and I have plane and motel reservations.
I've wanted to see this garden ever since I first heard about it.
I do plan to bring an empty suitcase. And a camera.
(Do y'all have fireants?)

I have been trying to get on the www.cemeteryrose.org site. Anyone having problems getting on?

I believe I am correct in saying that there are no fire ants in the Cemetery.
(Though I understand that there are some way to the South of us.)
In any case, you can always ask Baldo Villegas. :-) He'll be there too.

Ann, I'm really looking forward to seeing you guys!

Jeri

Flying down from Seattle and cain't hardly wait!

Yippee!

Jeri, I forgot to say how fetching and temping your photos are. How could anyone resist going?

Well, you know, the photos are only good because of the subject matter.
It's easy to be a star photog, with material like that.

:-)

Jeri

I was going to waltz in a week late but now that I know who all is coming I may try to alter my game plan...think, think, think.
la

la, I hope you'll come and bring Fang with you! And was it my imagination or will Rosefolly be in town, too?

So looking forward to seeing all of you and the roses.

And Jeri, your photography is wonderful. It's so helpful to see the flower and the plant all together. Makes me very grateful...and I just love you more!

Mutual Admiration Society Invoked Here. :-)

I really think this is going to be the Party Of The Year.

Jeri

Jeri: I didn't see this mentioned but will there be pruning demonstrations this day? My MIL is going to try and meet me there and she was wondering.

Kate

No. Pruning continued through late February, but is done now.
The Cemetery's website (see link) does list all sorts of events -- and will have the catalog up in a couple of weeks.

Jeri

I am so excited about this event and I was going to post on it, but you all beat me to it. This will be my first time coming & I am bringing my mom and husband (she's more excited than he is :-). I would love to connect faces to names at this event, since you have all provided me with endless patience and fantastic advice. I was hoping to get some feedback on how to be prepared...will there be a lot of people? are the roses sold as bands? is there a large selection? should I bring running shoes and pepper spray??? please help a girl out!!! lol

Hodgepodge -- Running shoes aren't a bad idea.
NOT because you'll need to run, but because you'll be on your feet a lot.

Now, if you plan to buy roses, I recommend that you download the catalog (which will be available soon) and study it before the day.
I've seen people with printed out copies, written over with notes, and that's a good idea.
BE THERE EARLY! The last couple of years, when the clock hit 9:30, there was a rush that reminded me of the old days at the Huntington's Rose Sale -- a sort of Le Mans Start.
The roses will be layed out on the tables alphabetically -- just as they are in the catalog.
Of course, there will be some treasures, onesy-twosies, that you won't expect to find -- good surprises.

I think there will be a big crowd this year. Some folks are coming a long way to be there.
Most of the roses will be in 1-G containers.
There will be quite a selection -- but the cool thing is that most of the roses available will be things that are NOT IN COMMERCE.

I think food will be available.
There will be a series of tours through the day -- those tram tours show you a lot more of the cemetery, AND give you a chance to sit down and rest your feet.

I think it's my most favorite day of the entire year. Christmas, Birthdays, Fourth of July, everything rolled into one blaze of color and fragrance and friends.

Jeri

I am workiing to get my sister in law from NH to come with us and also my dear Fang and perhaps my husband. It grows exponentially as the days pass.
la

I think this is going to be an absolutely unbeatable weekend of roses.
Not just because of the roses, but because of the wonderful people who are coming.

Jeri

Jeri:

Your posts about being on time and the level of anticipated madness that day set me to thinking. How many roses will be available that day? Don't get me wrong, if I leave there empty handed that would probably be a blessing considering how utterly out of room I am. But just wondering if you have a fix on approximately how many people may be in attendance compared to available roses.

Thank you.

Kate

I'm told that there are approximately 400 roses. Some varieties, there are many plants. Some, only one, or two. (Those in the catalog, there are 3 or more.)

I'm thinking maybe 150 people? (But Anita would be a better guesser than I am. She'll be back next week.)
But of those, some won't buy any roses at all.

Jeri

Thanks Jeri.

Kate

Hi Jeri-
Is it possible to mail-order from the catalog, or is it a catalog just for this particular sale? Does the Historic Rose Garden ship, or do buyers have to actually pick up the roses?
thanks,
Avalon

Sorry Avalon, there is no setup for mail-order.

Some folks have asked a friend to buy a rose, and send it to them, however.

Jeri

Jeri,

Thanks for the response. I had emailed someone at that website (Judy, I think) and she let me know about the catalog. I think Kate expressed my concerns perfectly...I just want to know if my chances of getting some of these beautiful roses are decent. Should I bring a cart to carry them?

Well, folks used to take Radio Flyer wagons to the old Huntington (Botanical Garden) Rose Sales. :-)

Jeri

Okay then, I'll be the tiny blonde woman pulling a john deere wagon with monster truck wheels!! watch out for me!!

Hi - I'm back from vacation!

We will have nearly 500 roses for sale, believe it or not. About 350 will be represented in the catalog, another dozen will be in a silent auction of especially choice roses, and the rest will be onesies and twosies. We usually have people show up with some roses to sell that we don't even expect, and we offer them, too - it's part of the excitement of the day.

Most of our roses are one-gallon. We'll sell them for $10. A few are two or five gallon, which will go for more. The Silent Auction items will start with a minimum bid. I don't think we'll be selling any bands, unless someone else brings them in.

It's possible to ship one-gallons, especially if you remove some of the soil. We're not organized to mail roses, but it's fine with us if anybody wants to do it for a friend.

We will rope off the sales table and open it at 930. The roses will be arranged by class, alphabetically. This is a change from previous years - we think it will help people shop. There are usually 50 or more people waiting at the beginning of the day. Last year, there were some great roses still on the table in the afternoon. The catalog will show how many of each rose is available. We have quite a few of some of the most desireable roses - Forest Ranch Pompom, Barbara's Pasture Rose.

I hope we have some of your wish list, Daun. Any of you, if you would like something next year, please let us know. Perhaps we'll put a clipboard on the welcome table, and encourage people to put down what they'd like. We try not to propagate roses widely in commerce, and avoid anything virused, so you won't see some of the roses that everybody loves. We also can't guarantee propagation success!

We'll have name tags at the front table and encourage people to put them on, so we can meet one another. I'm pretty hard to miss because I'm in the middle of things. Jeri will be at the rose sales table, and pretty easy to spot, too. I'm going to try to have time to mingle a bit. Please say "hi"!

There will be tours throughout the day, and Barbara Oliva will give a talk. I'll be doing one of the tours. We don't plan to lecture on rose care, although we'll be giving impromptu advice.

We'll have a place where we can store sold roses for you. A wagon might be in the way, or might work just fine.

I don't know if you'll need running shoes, but closed-toed shoes make it much easier to walk on our uneven, wood-chipped paths. The rose garden is three acres, and the entire cemetery is 28 acres of gardens, including native plants and perennials.

We won't be selling food, but there is a Quizno's across the street, and a Starbucks and about thirty other restaurants to the south on Broadway. If you bring a lunch, there are nice places to sit and eat. Our newspaper listed the cemetery as one of the top three picnic spots in the area!

To me, the day is first and foremost a celebration of the roses, the cemetery, and the people who love the garden. The rose sale is lots of fun, raises much-needed funds for the garden, and gets some wonderful roses out into other gardens, but the day is more than just a chance to buy roses. Getting together in that beautiful spot is the best part of the day. I'm just overjoyed that so many people are planning to come!
Anita

YEAH ANITA!
I'm glad you're back!

We can get this catalog whipped into shape pretty quick, and get it up where people can see it!

Jeri

It is such a wonderful event and I will be counting down the days....

Anita,
Yes, I have a wish list going. Just like Christmas!
Cant wait for Jeri to post her catalog and her descriptive narration of each and every rose. I think that Jeri should author a rose book of her own. I would gladly buy her book!

See you soon..

Daun

I went to the cemetery yesterday and took some photos of what was currently in bloom.
I have uploaded them to my photobucket account. Check them out.
If you are on Facebook, I've posted them there too.

Janelle

Janelle,
What a wonderful slide show.
I thought I had seen some large Banksias in the east. How tall is that tree that's being engulfed?
You have colors that I only see in late fall; yes, I'm envious. And thankful for your slide show.

Ann

Ann -- That's a BIG tree.
BIG!
I've never seen that rose at the height of its bloom, but even the one time I saw the tail end of it I was flat astonished.
At THIS stage it's got to be up for some special award.

I gotta make some use of that image of Janelle's in the catalog, so more people will see it.

Jeri

Ann,
I'm not good at estimating how tall that tree is. I'd say it is at least 80-100 feet tall, but that is a WAG (wild *ss guess). As Jeri says, it is BIG. The teas around the tree are 5-6 feet tall and they are dwarfed by the pine tree.
I'll try to post more photos weekly as more roses come into bloom.
If you go to my photobucket homepage (jannorcal) you can see the pictures I took 2 years ago the week before open garden.
Janelle

OK, guys,
Bear with me on this.
I garden in a dense clay and I have some roses that should be climbers, but are shorter vase shapes, instead. I just don't find that their roots can go just anywhere in that clay. Same roses down in the loam at the bottom of the hill get taller. Roots like loam. The ones at the bottom of the hill are in vole/mole heaven and put on vertical growth at the same time that the teeth from heII are chomping on their roots.
(I'm wondering if this is the reason that the R. setigeras in the east are shorter than that ones in the colder midwest with better soils.)

I've seen one R. x fortuniana near Norfolk Virginia that's in sand. It climbed a cedar tree. Its roots have to have fought it out with the cedar and I expect they somewhere were tapped into a canal across the street.

And that's where I wonder if your banksia isn't a microclimate/environment of its own. I see that tree and I can kind of visualize it supported by an equal underground volumn of roots....some of them tapping into a water supply somewhere.
And maybe...in a few more years....some of those teas will figure out how to rootgraft onto that banksia and share some of the vigor that that banksia has.

Just wondering.
(I've got something else on banksias that we need to look for in that mass...to see if some growth in the east is the same inthe west.)

Ann

Ann,
The roses in the cemetery get watered weekly. It is a fairly sandy soil. However, there may in fact be a high water table given the proximity to the American and Sacramento Rivers. Anita may know more about that than me.

Here is the banks today:
{{gwi:242199}}

We looked at that rose yesterday and think the tree is probably "only" 50-60 feet high,and the rose is going up 40 feet or a bit more. There's still room at the top for the rose to climb, and we believe that it will reach the top, and cascade down once it has no more place to grow.

Ann, I think you are right about the microclimate. The cemetery was originally a sand hill, created from the Sacramento river. Its high ground, in a city second only to New Orleans in risk of flooding, is why the cemetery was established there in 1850. Up at the top of the hill, where the banksiae is planted, is the sandiest soil of all. The curator has always suspected that the water table is pretty high. When we have removed roses, we are sometimes astonished at how big and deep the roses grow. I told some of the sheriff's crew to remove an Alberic Barbier, and went to lunch. When I checked on them, they were standing chest-high in the hole, still digging! It is a cemetery, for heaven's sake - we don't want to dig TOO deep! - so I had them stop, even though there were still substantial roots to be seen.

Many of our roses grow bigger in the cemetery than elsewhere. We don't prune hard, we rarely feed, and we do usually provide regular, weekly water. But it must be something about the microclimate/microsoil.

A funny thing about that banksiae - it's only been there a dozen years, and I'm told that a volunteer cut it off a few years after it was planted. All of that growth is from the last eight or nine years.
Anita

Would anybody be willing to buy a rose for me? I'd LOVE to have a Barbara's Pasture Rose, and I can't find anywhere else to buy one. Obviously, I'd pay for the rose+shipping, and a little extra for your trouble.

Thanks,

Eric

Anita,
One way to tell age of Banksias in the east is to see when the 'bark' splits. You know, the coating of a cane that is sort of smooth on Banksias. When it splits, the reddish brown corrugated under bark starts showing. Is that one to that stage yet?
(I've also got a use for that underbark that just begs for an arts program.)
Ann

And, Ann -- Have you ever seen the "Tombstone Rose," in Arizona?

The trunk of that is polished smooth -- I suspect from a century of hands touching it.
I do know what you mean about the under-bark though. I see that on our R. banksia lutea.
It was a gift from an older lady here in the area, and came to us as the ugliest stump you ever saw, with chopped off roots. She got it as a passalong, so it's a bit old.

Jeri

I have seen the Tombstone rose, but it was out of season. (It had already gotten hot there.)
(Before you ask, we don't grow it here, not because of climate, but because we co-existed with a neighbor's Lady B in the Quarter in New Orleans and it preferred our yard to hers. I've cut back many, many pounds of Banksia, pulled it out of air conditioners, etc.)

It's seldom I get to see optimum conditions for a rose. Or even very different conditions from the east. La Mortola in Columbia SC is one of the biggest...the roots look almost tropical as they engulf the stones at its base that used to separate its base from a walk way. There are some huge Teas there as well. The garden there has the name "Riverbank", and there's a deep creek not that far from that part of the garden.

OK, have I oversimplified a culture thing here?

Oh, no. Not over-simplified, I think.

But there's something about that cemetery.
The first time we saw it, it was mid-November -- and I walked in, and just stood there for a while with my mouth open.

It was that place that made me understand what Old Roses COULD be, if they weren't hacked back to suit a human need for space. And the place just gets better every year.

You just have to see it.
As, of course, you soon will! :-)

The catalog is almost done.

Jeri

(And husband fought the French Quarter Banksia four years before I married him and started sharing the fight) and the soil under our town house was sandy...he'd seen them working an excavation out in the street and the Quarter is built on the high, sandy levee deposit.
Our part of the our block was the old hospital so there may have been good nutrients there from bad medicine.
The theme continues.

Yes, the bark on several of our banksiae is splitting. Exfoliating is the word, isn't it?

I have a funny story about that word. My first trip to San Marino, CA, for the Great Rosarians of the World (heard Roger Phillips and Martin Ryx speak, just wonderful) was in the company of several other rabid rosarians and plantswomen. We were driving through a fabulous neighborhood, staring at plants and peeking at houses. Barbara, our curator, gasped "OH! LOOK AT THAT EXFOLIATION!" The driver slammed on the brakes, and we all piled out, cameras in hand, to take pix of a tree's peeling bark (it was a michelia, a relative of the magnolia). It was so funny - I joked that word was used much more in that neighborhood as part of a plastic surgery treatment than as a gardening term!

No, Ann, I don't think you've oversimplified the culture thing. I have spent years trying to understand why the cemetery roses are so uniquely large and beautiful, and definitely believe that soil and water are a big part of it.
Anita

The first house we bought in Tracy was built in 1940s. Small houses on narrow long lots. Between our house and the neighbor a Yellow Banksia was planted on our side of the common fenceline. In the spring it was a glorious site between the two side yard walkways.
Healthy and huge!
Problem was that the roots of the rose attached and feed itself on the sewer lines. Our roto rooter bill was insane!
We lived in the home for only a year, but will always remember the nature of the root system for the Banksia. Water and nutrients - Feed me!