We're having a mighty unusual summer. Temperatures are warm but not hot, we sleep with a blanket at night--I'm wearing a fleece overshirt as I type this--and we're getting some rain; all very unlike our normal droughty blazing summer. The garden has certainly benefited, giving us repeat flowering like I've never seen before, though by now it's tired and ready for a rest. The clouds, all the sky, have been remarkably beautiful this year. I think I'll remember this summer for the rest of my life.

This unusual weather has answered a question, or at least given strong support to one answer to it: why do my roses not rebloom? After our glorious spring flush we get very little rebloom until fall, while you, my forum friends, post pictures of your marvelous roses and talk about second flush, third flush, and so on, and I reproach myself for my casual fertilizing regimen, which is just mulch and nothing more. At the same time I believe what someone once wrote here, that water is the best fertilizer; and I knew that I couldn't say what my roses needed in the way of fertilizer until they got reasonable water. Well, this year they did get water. And they bloomed pretty well. So the mulch added to our soil does an adequate job of giving the roses the nutrients they need.

I've been enjoying 'Juno' this year. I was given cuttings of this once-blooming old rose a few years ago: they rooted readily and have grown and bloomed nicely since. The flowers are pale pink, cupped, double, fragrant, and weather resistant; and the plant has rather dark small healthy foliage and a nice arching growth habit that make me smile every time I see it, which is no small thing in a once-blooming rose. I read in the Vintage catalog that 'Juno' is a Hybrid China, which may explain why it does so well in the hot dry part of the garden I've put my plants in; but the foliage looks like that of a once-flowering old rose, which I like; so I get the best of both worlds.

I get roses from various gardening friends and sometimes subsequently lose labels and lose track of a variety's identity, and that's how I ended up with one plant I labeled 'total mystery rose' and planted a couple of years ago in a bed alongside the first slide zone. It has the foliage of a once-flowering old rose, more or less, a prostrate habit, lots of smallish thorns and dark foliage and healthy good growth; and when it bloomed the flowers were single, large, pale pink, with crinkly petals, and it seemed a myrrh scent. It also matched, as I recall now, the plants of 'Richardii' that I grew from cuttings I got in a swap. It's a very pretty rose and I'm glad to have it; I wonder if any of you can confirm that 'Richardii' is myrrh-scented? I still have no idea where I got this rose from.

Last rose is 'Francesca', a Hybrid Musk that's reasonably well known and that I've talked about before. What a beauty, and that's why I bring it up now. Years ago I planted a group of Hybrid Musks in the shade garden in a place that, as it turned out, they really liked, and so 'Cornelia', 'Vanity', 'Francesca', 'Penelope', and 'Nur Mahal' have been giving me considerable pleasure ever since. 'Francesca' sends out her eight-foot canes, unfolds her light green foliage, and puts forth butter yellow flowers, a bit at a time, all summer long. More perhaps than any other Hybrid Musk 'Francesca' shows her Tea rose ancestry: in the color and relatively large size of the flowers, in her growth, more like a shrub than like a pocket rambler; in her Tea rose fragrance; and in the overall delicacy and grace, combined with vigor, that characterize the whole plant. In our climate all the Hybrid Musks like part shade and protection from drying winds, and summer water, of course, when they can get it.

Melissa