Melissa, thank you for the detailed update! Your garden is truly a test garden for OGR durability. Many of us have become so accustomed to growing and admiring roses under ideal conditions. It's encouraging to hear that high numbers your OGRs have retained the toughness of their ancestors. Your drought produces exceptionally challenging gardening conditions, so I am relieved that your neighbors agreed to share their pond water. Your thoughtful pruning, companion planting, deadheading and water saving practices have, no doubt, increased the endurance of your roses and bridged their transition to dought condition survival. When you can find moments here and there to keep us informed on the latest news, please continue your updates. Rooting (pun intended) for you and your indomitable OGRs! Carol

I think your decision not to deadhead is a smart one. Right now, I can't do much deadheading, due to a hand problem . . . so the only things that have been deadheaded are the roses I am able to supplement easily. The ones down on the hill are on their own. Of course, some of them are just going to bloom anyhow -- but that's what they do.

I've felt for a long while that, with drought problems and higher temperatures stretching out into our future, it's wisest for me to concentrate on roses with a proven ability to withstand drought.

I hope your hand recovers soon, Jeri. Growing a garden to resist drought is definitely the way to go, I believe. I wrote this post to describe one particular situation and show what's happening. Carol, yes, I think gardens should be designed with considerable built in capacity to deal with stress.

I think I'll go over to my original post ('Watering ban') and continue my updates at greater length, but, it rained last night!! about 3 centimeters!! So that should ease the drought a bit. I had gone down in the big garden yesterday, and the difficult part of it, which is a large chunk of the garden, looked very miserable, with a lot of established plants suffering.

How's the rain been compared to last year, Melissa? I know you are further North, but I'm coming to see Ninfa next early May, 2019. I'm hoping for some rain for Italy and that early May will be a good time to see Ninfa next year.

Sheila, that sounds like an exciting trip. My traveling days are over and I hope to live vicariously through the many pictures you'll hopefully post here.

I will surely oblige, Ingrid, on the photo front. I really need to see that garden. I have gone Italian with my home, so I really should see how things are in Italy. I'm going to be staying in Rome and take a side trip to Ninfa. We are not going to rent a car. Too bad Melissa is so far North.

Oh, Shiela, that sounds like so much fun. You are going to have a blast.

Jin

Lucky you, Sheila! Will this be a trip for the whole family? You must be very excited! I’m excited FOR you! I’m already looking forward to the pictures and hearing about your adventures in Italy. Lisa

I'm going with a daughter, DIL, sister, and two long term female friends. The husbands will be keeping the home fronts warm. I'm sure it will be fun. My husband likes physical adventures and goals and getting up early. This may not be the Italian way.

Have fun, Sheila! I'm writing this from Florida a week into a month-long visit: that's why I haven't been posting. It has been a rainy spring at the farm and everything looks good, or did when I left, and groundwater levels are in excellent shape. I can't swear to it but imagine Ninfa is also doing fine. It has always looked like a wonderful place in pictures and I think you're doing yourself a favor going to see it. N.b. about the getting up early, actually, since everything tends to close at noon, and stay closed for three or four hours, it actually is a good idea to get up and out briskly, while churches and museums are open (museums may not operate on such a tight schedule) and while it's still cool. Or you can be out and about in the evening, but being a morning person myself I've always done my touring in the first part of the day. Oh, also, I think May is the best month of the year to visit Italy, so you're right on target. Now you just have to hope the weather will cooperate, as likely it will.

Since I'm here I want to post an update on how my garden looks after the drought of 2017. It was a major drought, with regular precipitation not beginning until November, meaning we had an entire year of seriously low rain coupled with an extremely hot summer. The garden shrugged it off. There was no significant damage of established plants. Well, for the most part; I did have to water some plants in the shade garden that were growing in very poor soil over rock, finding out that sarcococcas, for example, get unhappy in those kinds of conditions. But they didn't die. The roses were generally unperturbed, particularly the once-blooming old roses that are descended from local native species (R. gallica, R. canina, R. arvensis). It was reassuring to find that the garden could deal with unusually prolonged dry hot weather. Our neighbors' pond never went dry, so we were able to water our baby roses until the rains started. The last winter was normally wet and cold and the spring rains lasted a month longer than usual, continuing into June. This was no favor to the farmers, who needed to cut their hay, and everything grew like mad including the weeds. I'll deal with it when I get home. We also had a spectacular ice storm in December causing equally spectacular damage which I suspect we'll be cleaning up for years, and at the end of February the hardest freeze that I've seen since I moved to Italy in 2000. I know this because it froze back, hard, the enormous double white Lady Banks rose growing over the pergola entrance to the shade garden. The rose was planted around 2004 and this has never happened before. So it's been an interesting period.

All very interesting Melissa. I'm glad Italy doesn't seem to be in a prolonged drought. Good tips about the mid day closures of 3-4 hours. We'll have to arrange a transport and maybe have tickets to Ninfa ahead of time, I think, so we will get in for sure. Apparently, the first weekend of each month the garden is open reliably, so that is why I picked May 2-9 because it encompasses the first weekend. Ideally, we would have a weather pattern that had Ninfa blooming there, and my garden here would peak either before or after so I don't miss too much. I'm really glad to hear your garden survived the drought and winter storms and freezes so gracefully.