Ann, I hear you about the rain, we got 1.5 inches yesterday, and as I type this another line of rain is getting ready to move through. The only downside of all this rain is the botrytis....I got hit hard this year, must have been just the right conditions.

The upside is that I haven't had to drag the hose around in weeks watering new additions, and I've been putting in lots of companion plants...I just stick them in the ground and they grow like magic :)

Not sure if it qualifies for regional English, but I always remember my mom saying "It's getting ready to pour down rain."

Eric

I haven't measured the rain but it seems to be raining everyday.
It has not been good for the roses that tend to ball but the rest seem to be holding up OK. difficult for me to get good pictures.

DH keeps remarking how lush and green everything is.

Florence

I'd give my eyeteeth if you could send some of that rain to us here in parched Southern California.

Fog -- we got fog -- or have had 'til this week.
But no rain on the horizon.

Jeri

We finally got some rain yesterday-28 days with no rain in the PNW in spring! My roses had never looked better. We usually get a dry spell as they start to bloom out and then the rest is lost to two weeks of drizzel. Talk about Botrytis-has anyone tried the recipe for extra calcium that is supposed to keep it at bay?

patricia

I really think that here the botrytis drowned. Juno and Chloris are my notorious ballers, and both were fine this year. Clotilde Soupert balled, but it should produce more flowers.

Patricia, you must be farther in. We haven't had a week without rain in Portland (yet).

I'm a dog trainer and honestly it's worse for us. We use the word "b*tch" all the time in the original sense and this really rattles some people! Plus we're always talking about things like poop and humping.... Heh.

The botrytis here was disgusting beyond belief. I think that many flowers opened alright initially, but the thin petals of others rapidly became glued together and then the flowers dried that way -- and I ended up picking off buckets of crunchy brown gobs that puffed masses of spores (I was asked to help a bit late in the game, really). Ample rain is a good thing, really, but the fact that it sometimes necessitates additional maintenance can be forgotten after a few dry growing seasons...

I had to smile to myself as I realized that I had naturally assumed the "right" meaning of your American (North American?) colloquialism... it certainly could have gone the other way ;)

Stefan

We go from soaking, soggy mess of cool to (forecast) burning hot by the middle of next week. So much for spring.

I haven't noticed botrytis yet, but it's definitely raining cats around here--grumpy ones who stare out the window at the wet and blame me for the weather.

I'm glad for all of you who are getting rain and enjoying it. Here it hasn't rained to speak of since the beginning of May. Some roses, like 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', never opened at all, and others fried on the plants. I sure am looking forward to the day when our plants will be bigger and able to provide each other some protection from the sun and the wind. We're out every day weeding, watering, and putting down more mulch. Fortunately the two weeks' forecast says it will be partly cloudy and not too hot, and we might even get a shower or two, just enough to settle the dust. From now until the first rains start in late summer-fall, it's just a matter of hanging on.

Melissa

Catsrose - My Tabby is very grumpy too; we're in for the 2nd day in a row of violent storms here in the midwest so she's on her second day of indoor confinement and you'd think I was the worst cat mama ever. She's terrified of thunder, something new this year at 8 years old, and hides in the basement. I'm trying to explain the weather forecast to her but she's just not interested in why she can't go outside and patrol.
-terry
-terry

At least I think we are in the same universe.
I use Interlibrary Loan to borrow books from the University of Tennessee. Sometimes they are nice and pretty books, sometimes they are obscure history, and sometimes they are about less pretty things.

ILL just called and the very nice lady said "I have that mite book in for you and it sets a high water mark for ugly." Well, I guess I'm in a subset of the universe.(She must not have seen the plant gall book from California that I borrowed in January.)

Well around here the libraries act like the identity of the books should be a secret. At least they behave that way if they call.

"The book you ordered is here."
"What book?"
"The book you ordered."
"Oh, that book."

Given that I tend to do several at a time, these conversations aren't very enlightening. So I just go the library and get 'the book'.

When I ponder the existence of public libraries and the opportunities offered by interlibrary loan, it makes me feel that there's hope for mankind. The U.S. public library system is much more developed than what I've found here in Italy, by the way.
Melissa

Also here we are finally getting more sunny dry weather - just when the roses really start flowering - so none have been damaged that much by the rain. Last week a rotating front around a low pressure dropped 160 mm /6 inches of rain in 24 hours over us and some canes snapped and broke in the thunderstorms with hail, that made it look like it was snowing in june. With 6 inches of rain last week and showers/thunderstorms since - I don´t think I need to worry about watering much the coming weeks as it gets sunny and warmer and the roses will be peakblooming!

I take back my comment on 80 degree weather next week. 70's and rain, maybe sun on Wednesday or Thursday. There was sun for about an hour when I got home this afternoon, but it is gone again.

And anyone who says that rain helps to keep blackspot away isn't in my yard, but I don't have any powdery mildew.

I turned on the TV this morning to catch a local weather forecast and the show was at the Masters on Long Island with Al Roker showing the radar image of all the rain moving towards the golf course and my first thought was that the folks we know on Long Island were going to get good rain for their roses.

I did hear that golf courses have squeegees. Who knew?

Here's another rain story. The tar paper's off the roof, the shingles too, but the roofers went home. The storm I thought would just blow through turned into a stationary front. It's just sitting there. Water is running through the eaves. Some got in the garage. Drip, drip, drip.

Who thought I could ever think poorly of lots of rain after last year's drought? The rain is good but my balled botrytis flowers are not exactly inspiring.

Geez Ann, when I saw the subject of the post, I thought that you had finally taken some pictures of your 'version' of an English garden and were posting them. So lies one more definition and interpretation ...

Carol

Ann, not only squeegies but some big vacuum for the greens too...

We've had more than our share of good rain. Hot, hot, hot this weekend!!!

Carol,
If you want to hear the kings' English, there're still folks deep in the mountains around here who drop and add h's because they always have. My local plural isn't you or y'all but you'ns (pronounced you uns). And I've heard the very old verb form that I don't think appears in any "English Grammer" books as in "I've been knowin' him my whole life" which I think conveys the friendship much better than other verbs might.

My environment wouldn't make an English garden, too dry and exposed and no stonemasons to give me walls enough to do an English country garden. I do remember Gertrude Jekyll saying that she couldn't grow roses because she couldn't afford to have the clay hauled in. That I have and of a mineralogy similar to what she would have wanted. But I don't have the microclimate. My once bloomers rush in our sun and heat. And RRD means that if I grow any climbers, I have to be ready to rogue them out.

But right now I'm facing a new rose that has sprung up in a bed where no rose has ever been planted. It's blooming now, and it's multiflora related (heavily fringed stipules) and it's near where we took out a bird-deposited plane old white multiflora last summer. This new treasure has four rows of petals and opens buds that are deep but refined pink which open and hold their pinkness until day three. The buds and blooms are the size of Paquerette's (who lives about ten feet away). It is blooming LATE, multiflora bloomed out in early May to mid May (depending on shade) and right now R. wichurana has just started to bloom. So...tieing this together...I've been reading on Carnea, and it's place in early English rose gardens and trying to find more about the man who brought it to England.

I'm liken 'I've been knowin'".

Now I wish that you and Larry will get a digital camera and show some pictures please ...

Carol

Ann,
I had to laugh at your post because I too thought you were going to talk about Austin roses growing differently here.
Turns out I relate to another definition of "hammered".
My husband repairs hail damaged cars, so I'm always doing the hail dance. More hail=more roses for me. He'll report to me that certain cars are "hammered" and this can mean either that they were hit with huge hail and are unfixable, or that we're looking at fraudulent behavior, where owners took a hammer to the car in order to collect insurance money. Either way, "hammered" is bad stuff.
This year the hail has gone around us several times, but we've been lucky to get rain on a regular basis. Our rain comes with lightning, wind and thunder, several inches at a time. I envy those of you who get gentle rains that soak in instead of pounding the earth then running off.
Cindi

kay,
You made me laugh out loud...

In this day and age with the internet and all, they were probably so filled with anticipation to see a human come in and pick up a book, that the title meant little or nothing to them.

I can just picture the scene after the person that called you hung up the phone...

"Is she coming?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"She said either today or tomorrow, she wasn't sure."
"What do you mean, she wasn't sure?!"
yada, yada, yada...;^D

Anne,
How's my Upper Midwest English? ;^]

Rob
BC:)

Of course, I "speak" this form of English. My very favorite, and the one that confounds most people, is "I'm fixin to..." As in, I'm fixin to go to the store :-). Gotta love southern !!

Carol