I bought one this spring to use on the cement sidewalk that curves around the front of the house and encloses a huge flower bed, which sports a healthy population of bindweed. I thought it was great, until my DD9 decided to use the 'seat function' on one of her pea picking expeditions. The pea plot is on a slope, and DD9 placed the kneeler / seater on that slope, and sat down. After an inappropriate wiggle, the thing collapsed, bending the braces that hold it in the seater position. I bent them back with very little effort, which would indicate a poor choice of material. I'm not that strong, and DD9 tends to the svelte.

Hi Connie, I'm still planning to be there the 6th and 8th. I'm soooo looking forward to it. Today was Home and Garden Day here in Lynchburg and I had looked forward to it since last year. DH got sick last week and had surgery Thursday. We are still in the hospital, so.... I missed the tour. He is doing well and if he continues to improve we may be home by the weekend. I'm so thankful he came through ok. He has been through so much health-wise in the last 2 years. Hopefully he will be with me at the Festival. I feel the same way you do...Is it May yet? BTW.. DH and I were talking today and we are going shopping for flowers as soon as he feels up to it to make up for missing the Garden tour. YEA!!!! Plus, you know I've got to buy roses at the festival ;o) The only downer to all of this is DH won't be able to dig ANY holes for all of these plants. Wonder how much I have to pay 16 year old DS to dig! lol See ya there, Betty

I grow Barbara's Pasture Rose at home. I agree about the fragrance - I love to cut a stem for the windowsill over my kitchen sink, so that I can catch a delicious raspberry scent as I walk into the room. The cemetery BPR is bigger than Jeri described, but I have one at home that is about five high by four wide. I cut it back harder than we do a lot of the cemetery roses, to about 3 1/2 feet, and keep cutting stray canes off that are blocking the pathways or crowding other plants. Each cane removed becomes a cutting, of course, which is where all of those BPRs in the sale came from! Anita

We looked at that rose yesterday and think the tree is probably "only" 50-60 feet high,and the rose is going up 40 feet or a bit more. There's still room at the top for the rose to climb, and we believe that it will reach the top, and cascade down once it has no more place to grow. Ann, I think you are right about the microclimate. The cemetery was originally a sand hill, created from the Sacramento river. Its high ground, in a city second only to New Orleans in risk of flooding, is why the cemetery was established there in 1850. Up at the top of the hill, where the banksiae is planted, is the sandiest soil of all. The curator has always suspected that the water table is pretty high. When we have removed roses, we are sometimes astonished at how big and deep the roses grow. I told some of the sheriff's crew to remove an Alberic Barbier, and went to lunch. When I checked on them, they were standing chest-high in the hole, still digging! It is a cemetery, for heaven's sake - we don't want to dig TOO deep! - so I had them stop, even though there were still substantial roots to be seen. Many of our roses grow bigger in the cemetery than elsewhere. We don't prune hard, we rarely feed, and we do usually provide regular, weekly water. But it must be something about the microclimate/microsoil. A funny thing about that banksiae - it's only been there a dozen years, and I'm told that a volunteer cut it off a few years after it was planted. All of that growth is from the last eight or nine years. Anita