What an absolutely wonderful selection of roses! The only one I've had is Souvenir de la Malmaison and also the only one I could hope to enjoy again.

That is quite a collection of varieties. Right now, I only have Marechal Niel in my small greenhouse, and Nastarana, in the ground. It will overwinter under heavy mulch, here in Indiana. Last winter was -15 F, but it came back from ground level. It's one of my top for fragrance, though the Japanese Beetles love it, as well. Hope all of your plants do well for you. It would be great to see some pictures of these in the future! Bob

..a fine selection Nik and hope they do well for you there of course... I think it's best to keep going and look on the bright side... perhaps things can only get better and roses help us all along the way...

...I find 1 x Mutabilis quite enough for me though, I cannot imagine having 4... you must have a very large garden..

best wishes...

...and here I was freaking out because I had ordered 5 roses, two of which I don't know where will go.

Hi Marlorena, the 4 Mutabilis will eventually replace 4 Oleanders in a row, opposite a row of Old Blushes. Uprooting the grown oleanders (>20 years old, planted by yours truly) and preparing the soil wil be a costly business both in terms of money and in terms of elbow grease. The roses will probably spend a long time in pots... The garden (more of a plot I would say and a garden in eternal progress = mess) is about an acre (4000 sq. meters) including the house and other structures, so I suppose it is largish by european standards but not large by US ones...

A garden is never finished....I have Nastarana and have been well pleased with it. it seems to always have clean foliage and is a reliable bloomer. It must be tough to have lived in my yard for the past 10 years.

There are 3 main problems that face roses in my garden (if I discount that they ae mostly unable to survive without supplemental watering during the dry season, watering which I can provide for the time being, and the related fact that there are very many extremely efficient native plants to compete with): Powdery mildew, bloom frying and alkaline calcareous poor soil. For the first two I cannot do much other than get rid of the worse offenders. For the third I need to spend a lot of money and energy to help them which I'm willing / able to do to a limit. I'm sure there are roses in the above list that won't stand up to the challenge but gardening (vs. landscaping) is a bit of trial and error the way I see it. (PS. must remember to get rid of that MIP which has shown her worse self this year for reasons I do not understand).

So glad you got a Fortune's Double Yellow and a Belle Portugaise! I grow 30-40% of the roses on your list - great list, btw. However, those two giant once bloomers are among my most favorites.

Jackie

La Mortola has been your suggestion in a previous thread Camps. The way things are looking I may have to take your planting advice out of necessity. Not that I'm convinced of its correctness.

To rip off a classic phrase... ah if I had space enough and time...! I have exactly a fifth of those roses and apart from Leonie Viennot it's only the small ones. Blush noisette in particular is a good rose for me. A list to warm the cockles of any heart.

BTW, the way I see it, I should be planting more Kordes and, in general, germanic roses. Dortmund may just not be enough to appease the powers that are after my home (and everybody else's I should add).. Let me see, I do have a couple of Rosarium Uetersens, a rose called Sangerhauser Jubilaumsrose (that should do it, shouldn't it?) a few Gartentraumen and some other teutonic specimens by Kordes, Tantau and the like.

Ah well the rather good thing about gardening is the fact that it is a dynamic process. So, you have to be a bit more brutal and mean and the plants sulk for a bit...then, at some later date, when time and money allows (or the compost heap has finally born fruit) , you can simply throw a nice deep mulch around and wait for nature to take its course - worms, rain, general erosion, small animals, frost etc. will help to enrich the soil with little effort on your part. Also, I have never lost a plant in the ground (not even in the woods (the mangled stubs are gallantly leafing up) whereas just this summer, owing to work pressures and attention fails, I have lost 3 (THREE!) potted roses - farewell Pomponella, Sweet Pretty and Blue for You...although even here, I am entertaining ideas that they are not totally beyond the pale.

Try and get into an experimental frame of mind - surely almost second nature now, with the massive upheaval and insecurity facing Greece.

I am not being flippant about current planting theories - it is all about the microlife in the soil - a much wider and deeper picture than we might have previously thought - everything is connected..

No no - two fingers to Germanic roses - you are a child of the warm south, rosy fingered dawns and all that. Pride!

I certainly have or can make space for all these roses, climbers included, and many more. The cost of acquiring roses is nothing as compared to the cost of setting them up in their spots in my case. Due to the existence of other established plants and the stony nature of my soil virtually everything is a major project which also calls for hired labour. I certainly cannot uproot mature oleanders growing in my stony soil by myself but working with my Indian hired help, the always smiling Bakah from Punjab, it is doable. That costs me about 6-7Euro per hours work which may not sound like a lot to many of you but it surely is much more than Bakah would get working in the fields in some agricultural place in Greece. Water is relatively cheap (still), both the better quality grid water and running the 2 pumps required to pump and distribute the hard water out of my well. This is bound to change though.

Now, why do you amass roses and pot them, you might ask, since it is such an effort to install each one? Surely, slowly acquiring them would be more efficient. Well the answer to this lies on my mental inability to plan in abstract and the fact that, living where I live, I have very limited or no first hand experience of the roses I like. I also have no real life visual experience of rose gardening in conditions similar to mine. This and the fact that it is tough for them out there if they are planted as root pruned bareroots. Since I order most roses from abroad it also comes out cheaper to order many at a time than repeated orders of only a few due to expensive shipping costs.

I give the roses a chance to grow up and strengthen a bit and I give myself the chance to envision where they will fit by looking at them and looking at the space around me. I also have the chance to throw away the obvious mildew magnets or the ones that will exhibit chlorosis in my soil (if they have chlorotic tendencies when pampered up in pots they are no starters in my soil). This works but is a slow process.

The down side to this is that each rose becomes even more expensive, money and energy wise to maintain, not to mention the huge amount of water that is required to maintain a large pot 'school' like this.

Is there any way you could make your own compost? Maybe even putting banana peels in their soil?

I'm making my own compost, it's just not enough to go around. I wish a had a decent wood chipper, the one I have is only for light use. The cheapest compost material over here is sheep and goat manure, but apart from it being a weed galore, it tends to be alkaline.

I can't really afford to buy compost or mulch, here I can use leaves etc but I don't know if that would work where you are?

I've had to plant roses in poor soil though, they lived, some did well, others not until I was able to add compost (that I had to wait for to be ready..)

Just see how it goes, they might surprise you.

The engineers mentality - test to destruction and what's left is truly valuable.

Nik, How many roses do you have? It takes me about 1.5 hrs each night just watering my roses. I water them everyday when temp goes above 80 degrees. It takes a lot of time, but I don't mind, really relaxing after a day's work.

I don't really know. Upwards of 100. Most of the ones in the ground are drip irrigated once to twice a week depending on the temps. Some beds I flood once a week or every 10 days. Pots I hand water every day.

Just a thought - a nursery bed? Raised or in-ground - I'm thinking such a thing could be more water-retentive, and perhaps cheaper than lots of individual pots, yet would still allow for good soil, pampering, etc. Another thought - since you grow lemons, and everyone who grows lemons here always seems to have far more than they can ever use, would it be naive of me to think that bunging a few lemon quarters around each rose from time to time, or maybe incorporating them in the compost, might acidify the soil effectively? It's bad luck the sheep and goats' poo is also alkaline. Maybe it could be mixed with lemons, too, before aging? Please forgive me if this is all unscientific, amateurish tosh.

I'm amused by your idea of trying to appease your economic dictators with German roses! Can't say I'm completely convinced it will soften their stance, however, no matter how nice the roses... What b*ggers they're being! - especially since, from what I've read, they played a big part in creating Greece's economic difficulties themselves, going back to WWII - or was it even earlier? - and still owe Greece quite a lot of money from around that time, which they were never made to repay. They do seem to have rather conveniently forgotten those lessons in forgiveness and generosity, now it's being asked of them. Oh well, my understanding is scant, and I expect this is all a bit too political for a rose forum (not that I mind, but some may well object...)

Your selection of roses sounds highly desirable! It must be hard to select without having had the opportunity to see them 'in the flesh', and most photographs and descriptions are so maddeningly uninformative re habit, leaf colour, size and texture, thorns, hips, and so many other aspects of old roses that are all essential for feeling out how they'll fit into a garden. HMF is only helpful from time to time - far too many people posting lookalike show-off close-ups of their gorgeous blooms, IMO, which are next to useless for IDing or garden design purposes.

Comtesse :¬)

Nik, You're lucky to have a big yard, I'd put in 1000 roses if I were you. :-) Are the roses on your list bare root or rose bands?

I have 1 Reve d'Or, but it's still too small to tell if it's going to climb.

I am getting some bands next week: Souvenir de la Malmaison , Souvnir de la Malmaison Rouge, Secret Garden Musk, Grandma's Hat, Xiang Fen Lian. :-)

Hope everything goes well in your country, pray for you and Daisy, for some reason I thought Daisy is in UK. Hope she can ride her bike soon.

Comtesse thanks for your thoughts. A nursery bed is not a bad idea although it will need some initial investment. Also it won't help so much with giving roses an advantage since roses will need to be uprooted to be planted in their final spots. May be pots embedded in a nursery bed? Have to give this more thought. Can anybody join in with ideas?

I don't know if lemons can have any long term acidifying effect in a compost. I suspect no. They should be a good source of potassium though. I have been known to dump rotting citrus in my compost pile. I would never add uncomposted lemons directly in the mulch.

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We go wayyyyy back with the Germans at least back to 1832 when the powers the be installed a Bavarian prince as the King of Greece after Greece gaining independence from the Ottomans because they couldn't trust the Greeks to rule themselves... Well to be honest, many Greeks wouldn't trust other Greeks to rule them but that is another long story. The below link makes interesting reading..

King Otto of Greece

(Btw, of sociological and cultural interest is the below pic depicting a 'greek revival' monument constructed in Munich in 1862 commemorating some of this stuff. Please compare the essence and psyche, not the superficial form of the architecture with the original Parthenon.... To me this pic carrries lot of significant connotations) Propylaeen in Munich

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Summers, I only buy bare-roots since I have to import most of the roses (as it stands now I cannot import anything bar the ones already paid for...). Great roses you're getting, I think some of them are not easily available in Europe. Yes, Daisy lives in Crete, although I suspect she may be facing half the problems since their income may be coming from the UK. That's only a guess though. I tend to feel very positive towards people who have volantarily adopted my country to live in, regardless where their income comes from and who learn to appreciate the good and bad things of life over here and have a good thing to say about the country and its people. I wish I could live in Crete btw.

Someday when they are all grown up and having a spring flush you can think back to this and be glad for your perserverance and clever ideas. Solutions always come, especially in tough times. They did for my grandparents during the great depression. I know your roses will be fine. These plants have been around this long for a reason. Wishing you rain and free compost.

Well me and my daughter are planning a quickie trip to Athens (and onwards) in February when the fag end of British winters is dragging us down (but mainly to hang around the anarchists quarter like the good subversives we are)...so we will be bringing our tourist pounds (but not that many, I suspect).

So any sneaky seeds or such, just say the word

It is 30 years since I last rocked up on Skyros and Skopelos (never made it as far south as Piraeus) ...although I did have to sell some blood (AB-) in Thessalonika - hippy days.

Yes, I would have a go at Crete too (but looks like Norfolk will have to do)...I avoid Daisy's pics in winter as I just get jealous grief.

Camps, not guarranteed at all that Feb in Athens will be better than in Norfolk. It depends on the year. Feb is our coldest month and bang in the middle of our wet season although it's a rare thing not to have a few nice days during any month. Maybe you'll feel more at home than you would have liked. Also be careful, time in a greek nick (as opposed to with Greek Nik) is not supposed to be very enjoyable. Bring you pruners as it is pruning time.