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bethnorcal9

I'm so happy, I found a couple of surprises in the yard

bethnorcal9
10 years ago

The last few yrs my watering practices apparently left a lot to be desired, or should I say "LOST" a lot to be desired! I lost so many roses that can never be replaced due to not keeping an eye on my stupid sprinkler system. I use the drip tubing with little plastic spray heads that spray out a fine mist. Last yr I finally realized the pressure reducers I had to use on each valve in order to run the battery-op'd water timers, were not allowing enough water to spray out. So I took the reducers off and blew all the timers in the process (LOL) and now I have to manually turn them on & off and keep track of the times. My water bill was really high last month because I accidentally forgot to go turn them off a couple times for like three hours (auuggghhh!) Oh well. stuff happens. My life it so hectic and stressed all the time, it just can't be helped sometimes. All I can do is laff about it.

Anyway, my point in all this is that I thought I had lost a couple of roses and was pretty upset about at least one of them. The first one was my CAFE which was a grafted plant I got yrs ago from the "unmentionable" vendor who would send us to Disneyland if we did mention his name here. I had gotten a lot of roses from him, and only a couple were left. CAFE was one of them, and it just died to the ground this spring. The only place I could find a replacement was from Burling. So I ordered it and another rose that never quite made it for me in the past.... ANVIL SPARKS. Thankfully, she sent me some very healthy thriving plants and they are doing quite well in pots right now. But... I just happened to notice that suddenly there is a nice new stem growing in the spot where CAFE's body lies... and at first I thought it was rootstock, but now I believe it is coming from the crappy graft he did on the plant. So time will tell on that one.

But the one that has me really excited is IMAGINATION. It died all the way down to the ground this summer, and wasn't really doing too well the last couple of yrs. It's a rose I got many many yrs ago from Spring Hill when they used to carry lots of really cool roses. It's long since gone out of circulation and I was sooo ticked that it died on me. But, lo and behold.... all of a sudden this showed up:

{{gwi:323235}}

I've been babying it along. That bed is one of the ones engulfed in Bermudagrass, unfortunately (as you can see). I had to peel back some of the grass and yank out what I could of the dang centranthus rubra I stupidly planted in the bed to try and give it some room to recover. And I checked the other day to see if it was coming from the bud union or the roots. I appears to be coming from the underside of the bud union, so I'm pretty sure it's the true rose and not rootstock. It doesn't particularly look like rootstock. But I guess only time will tell. If a nice orange and yellow bud shows up, I'll know for sure I didn't lose it forever. And that'll make me really happy!!

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