Some of you may remember that back in December we received a rose order from the Serbian rose nursery Petrovic and planted it during an early cold spell. It was about eighty roses in all and conditions were very muddy as well as icy--at least the sun shone--and all in all the whole business was a challenge.
I've planted so many roses badly, and enough years have passed to make me understand that bad planting doesn't work, that this time I wanted to try and plant my roses well. With our heavy clay soil, poor in organic material, this means big holes and abundant amendment, and the material we have at hand is old hay. We bought the 400 kg. bales, hired a small backhoe and its owner operator, had the holes dug, and refilled the holes by half with dirt and great armfuls of hay, DH protesting all the while as he doesn't like to prepare planting sites before he has the plants in front of him. When the roses came we planted them, more dirt, more hay, indescribable mess, and then the wait, well filled by the wettest winter I've seen since we moved to Italy, where the average winter is already wet enough. The land where we planted the roses includes some unusually flat ground, by the standards of our property, and some of the roses, in their clay pot holes, had their roots under water for months. When spring came, the roses began making growth, and the weather was still sopping I began ditching around some of the wettest areas, and we pulled out three plants that didn't look like they'd make it where they were, and raised a couple of others. The roses in pots lived, one of the raised roses survived, the other died. There were one or two more deaths among the remaining roses, the rest made it.
I think we got it right. The roses still need to make it through the summer, the hardest season in our part of the world. They haven't grown all that much, but overall look fairly good. The soil is soft--this is miraculous, most of the garden, even well amended areas, has gaping cracks in the ground now and would need a pick to break it up. And this area's tendency to wet may be an advantage during the summer. I picked an area on a slope that faces roughly eastward, hoping that it would be cooler than most of our sun-blasted big garden, and in fact saw during the winter that the snow melted late there. The weeds are numerous but are at least relatively easy to pull. We've been working there lately, weeding and adjusting the planting holes to make sure that the root grafts are well covered, and I'm feeling pretty satisfied with the current state of things. I hope I'll still be happy with results by the time fall arrives.

The roses are a mixture of once-blooming old roses and Hybrid Perpetuals, with a few odds and ends thrown in. I bought the roses from this nursery because of the low prices, of course, and knowing that the nursery has an impressive collection, mainly suitable for cold climates, and a good reputation for the quality of their plants and in other respects. Shipping was nerve-wracking, but went well. The nursery owner knows English and answers e-mails so communicating with him was no problem.
We're hoping to make a second and final order, also a large one, but I don't know if we will have recovered from this one in time to order and plant this fall. DH is getting a bit old for this kind of activity, which gives me a sense of urgency, not to mention that I think we're all headed for a massive and prolonged depression. I want at least to have a good collection of roses when Goetterdaemmerung arrives.
Melissa