I've been trying to grow antique roses in SW Florida for the last 3 years and it's been a struggle. The summers have been relentlessly hot and very little rain, the winters have been abnormally cold and also dry.

The first year and a half I assumed that the weather conditions caused my roses spectacular lack of growth. They seemed to get smaller not larger.

Then the lawn started dying also. Hmmm, suspicions began adding up.
DH took a well water sample to the county agent and it was a saline solution.
Our house drinking water is wonderful, wins awards actually for taste. We live near the Gulf and the well has been infiltrated with salt water.

I lost over 2 dozen young roses and a year and a half of hard work, digging, fertilizing, agonizing and yes some money too. As well as losing some roses given to me by friends.

Irrigation has been turned off, drip irrigation installed using expensive city water as frugally as possible. More roses purchased. Drought continues but the roses are growing now. Ahhhh.

I love roses so much that giving up is not an option.

Denise

P.S. This past winter which was brutally cold for Zone 9.5 Florida meaning below 32 degrees the roses were green and happily blooming when most everything else was brown and sad.

Ingrid,

I too thought I was 'done' for the most part. Just weeding, mulching and enjoying. Ahhhhh.

NO, not to be.

I lost several roses to RRD last fall and I had to rethink how I have my garden planted. Because all roses were at one end of the garden I must assume that is a high pressure area that will continue to be prone to mite-drop. After years of researching roses, I now had to look for other types of flowering bushes and evergreens that I could try in that area. It was new to me and seemed strange to have no knowledge base. I have planted a reblooming hydrangea and Indian Hawthorne so far. I also moved (at great risk I suspect) a large Sea Foam rose. I could no longer see this rose where it was originally placed so it sort of felt like a "nothing to lose" situation to replant it in the "pressure zone". Time will tell.

The past 12 months have been heartache and backache as I tried to balance my garden and regain health and harmony. I suppose it will always be something....but in terms of heartbreak, the RRD can be paired with the loss of my entire pond of Koi due to a strange change in PH.

Somethings you cannot predict nor explain....and so it goes. The sun will come up tomorrow over a garden that is never complete and a gardener who really never wanted to be 'done' anyway.

:o)

Ronda

I know my garden will never be "done". There were times I thought, "Ah, this is pretty good", and then another challenge would arise. Challenges? First, there was too much shade. I had a lot of trees chopped down, but can't do anything about my neighbor's trees. Garden is on a slope and I stupidly had some rose arches built on the slope, only to find that it was trecherous to put my ladder against the arches and try to prune and train the climbers. After me hanging onto a prickly rose for dear life while my ladder fell down the hill, getting very scratched up in the process, down came the arches. Perhaps I should have tried terracing.

There were the thugs I planted that i still can't get rid of -- periwinkle, wild violets, garlic chive, mint. Boy was I stupid.

I've lost roses to RRD and blackspot. Finding no-spray roses that THRIVE in this climate has been a long process. A lot of trial and error. Tried some "zone pushing" to grow teas, chinas, and Noisettes and that failed miserably. In spite of reading and listening to other forum members, my results tend to vary. Now, even with 15+years of experience and my roses are somewhat stable, there are still some some smaller number of roses that get replaced each year with new ones I want to grow.

Maintenance of the garden. I thought all I had to do was prune and fertilize the roses once a year or so and I'd be done. Not so. I've found the bush roses are not really the difficult ones. The exhuberant ramblers are a lot of work to prune and train to keep them in bounds in my smallish garden.

Just the sheer amound of beds I have and all the weeding and mulching that it entails to keep them looking good is where most of the recurring work is. I also decided I wanted curved instead of rectangular beds, to make the garden flow and look more natural and less formal. So I've grassed over a few areas, removed a lot of brick edging, reshaped the beds into flowing curves, and consolodated my favorite roses to lesson this upkeep. I think it'll be less work in the long run, but for the past several years of transplanting and reshaping it's been a lot of extra work. And my garden has new areas again where plants need to mature and settle down.

Well, it has never occurred to me that the garden was ever going to be done, so at least I have never been saddened to learn that. My entire half acre is a work in progress, and I have learned to live with the reality that it will never be more than a continual canvas of change. However, last year my zigging and zagging in a vaguely forward direction got a real dose of reality when I was beset by

G O P H E R S ! ! !
Not that I hadn't always had them, but they had always remained just below the toxic level until last year, when I discovered that the understory of my property belonged to the gophers and that there were tunnels everywhere. So.....everything had/has to be dug up and replanted in gopher baskets, and nothing new goes into the ground without a gopher basket. I have lost track of how many rolls of 100' gopher wire I've bought so far; I should buy stock in the wire company:-))))))

But, the harder I work the more I love it all. A few years ago I thought I had enough roses.....maybe 100. I just noticed that my list on HMF has now topped 200, and over the past two weeks I have bought and planted 6 new clematis to gussie up the roses, so....I'm still planning on winning this war.

Susan

Ingrid, by the fact you are HERE (as are we), your garden will never be finished! We aren't just "gardeners", we are primarily COLLECTORS. Someone who gardens has a few roses for cutting, accenting somewhere in the garden, etc. WE continually find the next "perfect" rose and must acquire it! Of course, "perfection" is an intensely personal and variable term. Until time, energy and other necessary resources run out, I seriously doubt any of us will ever be "finished" with our gardens. Oh, and don't worry about jarring combinations. Some of Nature's most inspiring combinations have been jarring (purple lupine with gold California poppies). One of my favorites was completely accidental. Orangeade (floribunda) with Raven penstemon. Spikes of deep purple jutting through a bush laden with saturated, brilliant orange clusters of flowers. It inspired me to create a purple and orange arrangement in a tall, black amethyst Depression Glass vase. It was very tall, with spikes of glads, roses, columbine, penstemon and silver Dusty Miller foliage. Difficult as all get out to get into the car and even harder to get into the hospital room it was headed for, but I was stopped a dozen times by people who wanted to know WHERE I got that arrangement! Kim

I can't add anything to this thread other than saying you have confirmed my trepidation of times a coming. Still a newbie, and definitely feeling like a newbie, I am enjoying my 2nd year garden. Last year was a breeze - planting, and pampering, with great rewards. This year I'm seeing my first misc. signs of BS, PM and RRD, and wondering when any loses will begin. Fingers full of mushed aphids daily, I know my tasks of merely squishing, fertilizing and watering will start interating into full-on struggles to keep some of these beauties alive. With the knowledge of this forum to fall back on, I think I'm ready!

It's true. Gardens are not static. Like they say, if it's not one thing it's another. In the past my biggest problem (if I remember right) was lack of water for the roses. Then I discovered accidently that my roses do much better with daily water. So I installed a micro sprinkler system through all the beds. Wow! Did it work and work wonders!! I've been all happy and self-satisfied for over a year, but lately the worm has turned. My nemesis is squirrels. SQUIRRELS! I remember one of my rose-sisters in CA warned that squirrels were a big problem for her drip system (maybe Rosefolly?). Little did I know...

These buggers have chewed through several plastic/pvc connectors, 1/4" tubing for the pots, shrubblers, drippers, brass knobs, resin chairs, stacked nursery pots, the corner of the shed... causing geysers and mini-firehoses that shoot water everywhere making my water bill spike off the chart and reducing pressure in the line so nothing gets water. Since it operates while I'm asleep, I don't know about it for a while - until plants start looking bad - or I get a utility bill in the mail. The only thing that stops them is hardware cloth so I'm looking at wrapping all the 1/4" tubing in hardware cloth. That should be fun.

After they had breakfast on a new hydrangea plant (not in the ground yet) I declared war and decided I would put out D-Con, taped to the top of the shed (their super-highway through the trees) where kitties can't get to it. Early the next morning I awoke in a panic - what if the birds eat it? I got up and peeled it off. A friend told me it wouldn't work anyway because squirrels are smarter than rats. I was looking forward to picking up the bodies.

Thrips ruined the end of the first flush, and Anna Olivier's second flush is a disaster. I may have to reconsider her future along with E Veyrat Hermanos who, despite a beautiful beginning, balled completely after a poorly timed rainstorm. The upside of that is looking for replacements. :)) Encroaching shade may be the end of Mrs B R Cant in which case I'll buy another hydrangea. They're deciduous (I hate bare bushes all winter), but they don't mind neutral soil. The armadillos dig up the beds every night, but so far haven't damaged any plants - just make the bed ugly and make the sidewalk & driveway messy.

Apparently, for some of us gardening is the proverbial "two steps forward, one step back", and for others it's "one step forward and two steps back". And next year we'll all switch places.

Sherry

Here is a link that might be useful: If only sweat were irrigation...

Ingrid,
Your post made me laugh! I loved your frankness.
All these accounts of difficulties make me feel uneasy: when will my turn come? Though we're having a hot dry April, and since we planted a whole lot of trees and shrubs in late winter and even into this month--NEVER a wise thing to do--we're all set up for a drought disaster. A summer like we had in 2003 would bring quite an adequate amount of misery and destruction along with it. There's no cool weather in the two week forecast either, though it's supposed to rain, moderately, this weekend.
We have a bit of damage from the wild boars, and though there are deer in this area, possibly increasing their territory, the wolves are advancing as well; and there are poachers about. Are we moving closer to ecological equilibrium? The last two years slides have been an issue in all the province. Our neighbor's land began giving way above an old slide in our garden: DH heroically stopped part of it with a barricade, and allowed part of it to descend into our old slide area, which actually partly filled up the hole. That entire part of the garden is humping and bulging, though it hasn't actually given way.
We've been lucky, I think: through drought and flood, slides, beetles and cane girdler, pottery clay soil, nothing truly terrible has happened. Or else I've gotten somewhat seasoned by twenty years of failures along with my successes. But I think my ratio of good fortune to bad has been quite favorable because of the basically kind conditions in which I garden.
Melissa