What a coincidence - I just posted pictures of my roses and plants entitled "What a difference Three Years Make" to some of my garden friends when I came across this post. It might be worthwhile to say that with the exception of two roses, all the ones I planted were either bare roots or bands. The biggest mistake I made was not putting enough forethought in selecting my front roses along the fence that make a huge impact at the entrance to my home. The second mistake was I purchased some cheap bare roots that were not only virused but mismarked at Wal-mart. I feel yanking the Blaze that I have since they are once bloomers for me. Of course I planted the roses way too close - my place looks like a jungle in front and continually I have to prune. But along with the mistakes, I did some things right too. On my rocky hillside which has such poor & rocky soil, I just never gave up but "threw spaghetti on the wall" so to speak and see which ones thrive. After wasting much money on plants that could not thrive there and fighting with gophers continually, I decided to grow mainly Mediterranean plants there like lavenders, citrus, drought tolerant plants intersperse with wild flowers such as poppies, sunflowers, blue bonnets, etc. Other than geraniums which are my life-saver and can be grown everywhere, most of my plants now are in "squat pots" on the rocky hillside and buried into the ground. So controlling the soil is the key to healthy plants. But my garden is a continual work in progress and I have a lot more to learn yet! But I am thankful for all the things I've learned here.

http://picasaweb.google.com/maechandran/WhatADiffence3YearsMake#

Oh, aimeekitty! Your clumsiness in the garden is very enduring -- LOL about the rock dropped on Sombreuil.

This is going to be an interesting post. I cant wait to see the veteran rosarians responses.

Great topic aimee!

malibu_rose - thanks for playing! :)
When you say "The biggest mistake I made was not putting enough forethought in selecting my front roses along the fence that make a huge impact at the entrance to my home. " What do you mean exactly? Do you mean the roses you chose...? or how you planted them...? or what? what would you have done differently?

How close did you plant your roses together...?

I love this photo comparison:
2007:
http://picasaweb.google.com/maechandran/WhatADiffence3YearsMake#5468227373510026082

http://picasaweb.google.com/maechandran/WhatADiffence3YearsMake#5468227405709488226

2010:
http://picasaweb.google.com/maechandran/WhatADiffence3YearsMake#5468227416481804546

http://picasaweb.google.com/maechandran/WhatADiffence3YearsMake#5468227517577933938

your geraniums on the hillside are amazing. They look like they just grew there wild... like as if you're walking in the barren desert and all of the sudden you see a magical oasis

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vuwugarden - you should have seen my face! I can laugh about it... but those poor little roses! The ground is very hard and has a lot of rocks here,... so digging holes is a battle... it's very hard not to fall off the shovel and fall onto a plant. :)

The stepping-on thingie sounds familiar, the horrible thing with my new roses is that one nursery tends to cut them really low for shipping, so I have to protect them from my cats stampeding on them... On top of that, my cats apparently think that a bunch of thorny sticks were placed in the garden so they can scratch their chins... Gave me a couple of heart attacks, especially the intentions to chew on the new growth... they really think that everything green is cat grass...

Notice the bamboo stick protection teepees. Good to keep myself reminded where the rose is too. ;)

{{gwi:265103}}

I'm just starting with my new gardens, this will be my 3rd spring in this place and last year I could not do anything in the spring (last months of pregnancy are not really good for weeding) and in the autumn we had roadworks, which often threatened to destroy my garden, so nothing got done either.

Anyways, here it is how it looked when we bought it:
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Last year back yard looked like this (this year pergola got added on a side and more stuff planted, just do not have a pic of it yet) and front is pic from this early spring:

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As for mistakes, I think my biggest one was a miscalculation of the sunshine. We looked at the house in the autumn and moved in in Feb, so we had no idea that some parts of the garden really get scorched.

Also, it was not with the roses, but stupid miscalculation of fertilizer and not being careful with applying it. I had a very nice azalea which I brought from our previous garden and which was doing really great the first year here. And then I decided to give it some fertilizer, not being careful to mix it with the ground properly, although I was well aware that sometimes it can burn the plant... Next day all azalea leaves were brown and it pretty much went to the azalea heaven. Still angry on myself for that mistake, really loved that plant.

Also, from rose purchase miscalculations I made one of epic proportions - buying Paul's Himalayan musk without checking its size online... I can now assure you that a rose which has 1 stick with 2 buds, can have five 6 feet tall canes in the end of the season. x)

Oh and that's my probably most scary moment from all gardening in this place so far - that's how it looked second day after we moved our plants from old garden and I had still about half plants to plant... Got horrible cold afterwards. x)

{{gwi:265108}}

I guess I wasn't very clear on that, aimeekitty. What I meant was that I should have done my homework and research better. All I knew was that I wanted something that climb and the color red to make a statement in the front. I should have never purchased these bare roots at Wal-mart and should have consider whether the rose would bloom all year round and whether it had fragrance. Had I done further research I would have realized that the traditional rule of planting three feet apart does not apply to climbers. I had decided to grow red ones so I picked 4 Blazes, 2 Don Juan or so I thought. Well, it turns out that one of the Don Juan was Climbing America, and not at all red but a salmon coral. The Blazes were all once bloomers and unfortunately they are all virused! Later I yanked the remaining Don Juan and planted a Golden Celebration in its place. Well, I love GC and even though this rose is not a climber it grows 6 feet tall and is perfect for my 5 ft. fence; best of all Golden Celebration is prolific and fragrant. So this taught me that one should visit gardens in the area and see just how tall & big different roses grow in one's area. One may think a climber is needed when a regular rose like a GC would do. Well, if I get ambitious I can still tear out all the Blazes and start over again! I guess in another 3 years or less, I'll have a even more beautiful and fragrant garden! Mistakes can always be undone - just lots of hard work and patience!

OK then, in the service of truth, my first rose order was for 4 roses which, in the catalogue photo, looked lovely. They were Many Happy Returns, a semi-double floribunda, Jenny's rose, another floribunda, Queen Elizabeth and Blue Moon. Well, not only was there a horrible mismatch of growth habits, the colours looked dreadful together. They were all planted in a huge barrel (but still not big enough) but you can imagine the horror after a couple of years. The gauntly QE 5feet taller than the dumpy MHR while BM had never more than 3 blooms which looked a dirty grey next to JR which faded to a greeny parchment colour. Oh, it was ghastly. All gone now apart from one other rose I also ordered but kept separate as a climber. Madame Gregoire Staechelin, a beautiful once blooming vigorous rose (so I got lucky a little). So now you know what hideousness I am more than capable of, feel free to gloat.

My biggest mistake so far which has cost a years time and the loss of many baby roses is not having our irrigation water tested.

Last year was a drought year so we watered whenever it was legal to do so. The roses either sat there doing nothing or grew smaller until they disappeared. I assumed it was the drought and a scorcher of a summer. When the lawn went to h**l to we tested the water. Extremely salty due to the well being contaminated due to the drought.

Long story short: irrigation turned off 9 months ago and roses are flourishing with no supplementary watering (mulched well). More roses ordered, replanting continues.

Denise

hoovb, your before and after is truly, truly stunning. I've seen pictures of your garden before and they were wonderful but now it's evolved into something truly glorious. I feel humbled and awed and won't be visiting MY garden any time soon. You truly have a gift and I can't fault the hardscaping either. Who would really notice it much with all those glorious blooms around? Absolutely wonderful and very inspirational. And of course, your house is to die for. (If I were to burn my house down will the insurance cover.... never mind).

Ingrid

Well, I'm going to be brave and post after hoovb. The previous owners were not gardeners as you can probably tell. I haven't looked at the before pictures in a long time and it was quite interesting to me to see the difference.

Before
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After
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Before
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After
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Before
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After
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Fall 2009
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Ingrid

This is my second major garden, and I learned a lot of the basics with the first one. I didn't have the forum with my first garden, but I did have my horticulturalist sister, a keen gardener herself, who gave me lots of information, encouragement, and plants. I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of either of my gardens; words will have to do.

Things I learned:
My first garden was in the Pacific Northwest, and I learned to love the old once-flowering roses there. At first I wanted repeat-blooming roses, but the more once-bloomers I grew, the more of them I wanted. They don't work everywhere, but in the PNW they're fabulous. I have and love them here as well, but they come into flower right when it's getting really hot, and so aren't as well suited to local conditions as in Washington. So the other thing I've learned is to grow roses suited to your local conditions. I'm gradually allowing Bourbons into my garden here: they did poorly in my first garden because they didn't have summer heat, while here they're great.
I learned to plan for succession of bloom, rather than roses that bloom all year long (this is still a characteristic of temperate climates): here this means, more or less, spring bulbs, lilacs, tall bearded iris, peonies and roses, clematis, lavender and buddleia, dahlias, roses again.
I found out that roses are drought tolerant plants that can happily go weeks without water; in fact, I found out that a lot of plants are more drought tolerant than I had supposed. Western Washington and the Italian foothills are both dry in summer.
A lot of my mistakes in my first garden involved not siting plants correctly: not exploiting walls for warmth; putting shade plants in shade, sun plants in sun.
For some reason, right from the beginning I gardened organically and didn't use the various poisons available to help the gardener; and I also believed in mulch and soil improvement from the start. I've never seen any reason to change this approach.
I started gardening as a non-pruner, and have slowly learned how to prune as I went along. I think this is the healthiest path of development. As Henry Mitchell said, often the best thing the gardener can do is nothing. My gardening philosophy is minimalist: I do only what I think is necessary, always working toward a garden that will be relatively self-sustaining (I still have an enormous amount of labor, don't worry!).
My sister introduced me to the writings of Henry Mitchell, among other things, so I read about garden design and plant selection from the start. I think this helped me avoid a lot of mistakes I might otherwise have made.
I've learned here in Italy to be very wary of doing anything that might provoke a landslide.
About roses, I've learned to look at the whole plant rather than at the flowers, and to take size estimates with plenty of salt. It's really hard to get an idea of what a rose is like without seeing a well-grown specimen at first hand. This is also quite terribly true of flower colors: photographs are untrustworthy.
Melissa

What a difference, Ingrid. Night and day. Looks wonderful!

Thank you hoovb, that's high praise from someone with a garden of your caliber.

I forgot to mention my mistakes, which are many. At least fifty of the roses I started out with are gone because of lack of tolerance to the heat here in the summer. Of course I planted much too closely together, a mistake I still make even though I now know better. Many of the companion plants I chose looked good for a while and then either deteriorated or became too large or woody and had to be replaced. I'm still learning my way around in that respect. Color combinations have also sometimes been a challenge, with apricots being difficult to place, and besides I've learned I don't really appreciate them, no matter what other good qualities they may possess. It all takes time, which I now understand, but I think in the beginning I thought it would be much easier than it really is. As long as there is visible progress I don't mind as much now if I make a mistake, and I've begun to accept the fact that inevitably plants will need to be moved. I now also realize that gardening is not a static pursuit, that there is always something to be rethought, improved, made more harmonious. And that's a good thing because this way there is always the pleasure of the new, and the anticipation of wonderful things to come.

Ingrid

We moved eight years ago now. The first couple were spent on the house; the next couple on cleaning up what twenty years before had been a beautiful garden. Then the work on the front rose garden began.

Back in 2003 (work wouldn't start for a couple of years): {{gwi:265118}}
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From 10 Rose Garden Update

I started modestly, by cleaning up and expanding an overgrown corner of the lawn in 2007. {{gwi:265120}}From 10 Rose Garden Update

But I had discover the Antique Roses forum, so I wasn't satisfied. I posted something like this when the hardscaping was done. This is spring 2008. The little roses are not all apparent. {{gwi:265121}}
{{gwi:265119}}
From 10 Rose Garden Update

And now this. And this winter/spring has been amazingly good for flowers. {{gwi:265122}}
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From 10 Rose Garden Update

Click on the link to see more.

Mike

Mike, your garden is beautiful. Loved your rose album. What a lot of hard work must have gone into that project, but the results are well worth it. Mme. Isaac Pereire is an absolute monster. When it's blooming it must be breath-taking.

Ingrid

Mike,
I like your garden too. I would so much rather see a garden than an expanse of grass. Nice house as well.
Melissa

I've started to put rocks around my baby roses, it helps me notice them more. and I have a lot of rocks I dug up. :P at least I like rocks...?

I really appreciate you guys all showing before and afters... your garden doesn't have to be perfect. It's just wonderful to see how you go from something that is almost nothing to something that's growing and happy and with your own personal taste! That's very inspiring to me.

Hoovb, it's hard to believe that all those huge beautiful roses originally weren't there! So impressive! Thanks for sharing. It really helps to see people's whole yards and not just a beauty shot of one bush.

Ingrid, your yard is so charming! From a dirt lot to that! How lovely! I really like the colors you choose. :)

Melissa, thanks for taking the time to reply so detailed!
I'm hoping that by getting ya'lls advice for roses tolerant to my zone, that I'll avoid at least some of the poor-zone mistakes. But I'm sure there will be some that just aren't happy here for whatever reason.
I'm also really enjoying planning some daffs, TB and spuria iris, camellia, lavender and dahlias... and poppies and some other drought-friendly plants like penstemon and salvia.

I'm hoping, too, that after the roses get established a bit (maybe next year) that I wont have to water that much. It's very dry here,... but most of the plants I picked are drought tolerant.

hopefully I can learn about pruning and fertilizing a bit as I go,... since so many people say you shouldnt prune OGRs or climbers or new roses as much for a couple years.

Mike, what a lovely yard! I love your tall arch growing with the climber in the midst of it all. That must have been a lot of work. Love the hardscaping.

aimeekitty,
Good luck, and keep us posted.
Melissa