Beautiful! Good luck with your great new garden!

Great looking garden, Newbie! I love your hollyhocks, too.

Newbie, your garden looks beautiful. I love the hollyhocks too . Your arrangements in the vase is so pretty. Love all the companion plants. Splash of colours :)

Jin

Wow! It looks great, newbie! I love the beds you’ve created. You have just the right mix of roses, flowers, and shrubs, to my eye. It’s very pleasing to look at. Your Abe Darby looks wonderful. He really is a beauty, isn’t he? I’m thinking your name, “Newbie”, won’t be appropriate for much longer. Well done, your hard work really shows. Lisa

Very pretty. Good work has gone there. I'm afraid you're rightly worried about Abe becoming large. He will, in your climate.

Good Lord! It'll be years before my garden looks that good, if ever! That is really beautiful. Somehow I feel as if I've seen your garden before you planted things in it. Did you post it here before?

Hi newbie, one thing about living in Perth is that your roses are unlikely to get blackspot! I tried Abe here, but had to sp him, as there was hardly a leaf left, , due to bs. I adored the fragrance, and the blooms, and was very sorry to see him go.

Your garden looks amazingly neat and established.

I wish you many happy decades of gardening.

Trish

Thank you so much everybody for your kind words! :-) It's all still very much a work-in-progress and I keep having to shift plants around or taking some out altogether, as I made the terrible newbie mistake of planting things too close together! Especially in the front garden, which is where I started. I've got better so things in the back garden are a bit more spaced out.

I'm a bit of an obsessive pruner so that's probably why it seems so neat. I'm out there every day picking off anything brown I can see and deadheading the minute the petals fade... I really enjoy "grooming" the plants - I find it very relaxing :-)

(Hmm... Lisa, maybe I should change my forum name to "Obsessive Pruner" LOL!)

But it's probably the novelty - haha - when I've been gardening for a while, I probably won't find pruning so appealing!

Oh, yes, I love my hollyhocks! I bought them as seedlings - an 8 pack in a tray - and I can't believe how huge they've grown! They've all reached 8 - 10 feet. And I had to put some in the shade, as I ran out of space - but those still seemed to grow fine anyway. They do all get rust horribly on their lower leaves, and they've also had white flies and spider mites - and were chewed up by grasshoppers - so they are very "high maintenance"... but they're just so majestic and beautiful and make such a statement - no other plant (except for the roses) have such a presence in the garden - that I feel the trouble is worth it and I plan to grow them again next year! :-)

Here are a couple more pics of them:

This is one of the narrow beds in my rear garden. This pic was taken just after I planted Princess Alexandra of Kent and Lady of Shalott at the front of the bed (again, probably a mistake!!)

But thank goodness, it doesn't seem to have fazed them. They're as tall & flower as well, as the ones in the front garden, which are in full sun. Maybe in Australia, the shade gets enough UV radiation too! ;-)

(By the way, I'd read everywhere that hollyhocks are biennials and wouldn't flower until their 2nd year... so I was really surprised when these flowered! I only planted the seedlings in Aug last year - they were barely an inch high - but they shot up suddenly when spring arrived. It was amazing.)

~ HY

Trish - that's a shame about your Abe! We lived in Sydney for a year
before we moved to Perth so I know all about the horrible humidity in
the summer there. And the heatwaves!

That's encouraging to hear about Perth and blackspot... although I have to say, my Iceberg does get it! :-( It had blackspot really badly over winter and even after
spraying with organic fungicide, it still always seems to have a couple
of leaves affected. Even now, in the middle of hot, dry summer! I'm
really surprised - I don't understand why Iceberg is so popular
(everyone seems to have it in their garden) if it blackspots so easily??

vaporva
- I posted a couple of weeks back asking about my Pat Austin's octopus
canes and what I should do with them. I posted a picture of my garden
then, for reference - so maybe that's what you remember?

~ HY

What a pretty garden you have Newbie! It's hard to believe you're a beginner gardener. I love your hollyhocks too!

Are you planning to train your climbers on your walls? You are so lucky to have walls like that to train roses on.

I look forward to seeing more pictures as your garden progresses and your roses get bigger!

newbie, I can barely bring myself to call you that after seeing your lovely front garden. It looks so professional and well-thought-out. Everything seems to be thriving and I look forward to seeing lots of pictures of your maturing garden. I live in a similar zone and have found that many roses do very well with just a few hours of morning sun, and the flowers are much better-preserved. Other than the Austins the smaller Bourbons such as Souvenir de la Malmaison should do very well for you.

What a gorgeous, well organized garden you have!!! I adore your Hollyhocks! They are one of my favorites, although they don’t last very long here, and I have to treat them for leaf miners or they don’t bloom. I always love viewing the other posters gardens! Mine is not nearly so well thought out, more of a happy madness then anything else. I love seeing beautifully planned gardens.

Envying your hollyhocks! I love them, but a lost cause here, due to rust. Lovely garden.

Hi HY - could you please tell me where you bought your roses from in Australia? I'm trying to find some old fashioned roses. How is your Reine Victoria doing? Are the blooms on the smaller scale? Love Abraham Darby too. Wish I had bought it with me when I moved houses. If you like AD you might also love Evelyn . Do you have that rose? Its a signature rose for Evelyn and Cabtree company.

Hi Tangles - I got my roses from a local nursery in Perth, called Melville Rose & Garden. The owner, Rob Melville, comes from a family of rose growers and is really experienced. He'll only sell roses that are at least 2yrs old & growing well, and they're all grafted on Fortuniana. He specialises in David Austin and Delbard roses, but has some heritage / OGR as well (and various HT and floribundas). If you go on his website, there's a list of all the roses he grows.

Here's the link: https://rosengardenperth.com/

The nursery has the most beautiful display garden where you can see the mature bush examples of most of the varieties - which is really handy to see how big they get and the bloom form, etc. And I love it because it's in the cottage style, rather than a formal rose garden, so it's full of cottage garden perennials and just a riot of colour and flowers and shrubs rambling everywhere. My dream type of garden! :-)

Are you in Western Australia? I know there are several specialist rose nurseries on the East Coast and South Australia - I think Treloar is the biggest? They've got a HUGE list on their site (http://www.treloarroses.com.au/) - but I'm nervous about buying online from Eastern nurseries as I'm not sure they're grafted on Fortuniana and as I understand it, you really need Fort for roses to thrive in WA's dry sandy soil and be protected from nematodes (also, it's nicer going in person to choose & getting a potted rose than a bare-root, I think). But if you're not in WA, then you have a lot more choice! :-)

Oh, I forgot to answer your question about Reine Victoria! I have to confess, so far, she has been the most disappointing of all my roses. I got her because I love the very cupped, globular bloom form but she hasn't produced any buds since I brought her home 3 months ago (all the Austins have gone through 2 flushes now and are gearing up for a 3rd). She came with one bud from the nursery and that did open after I brought her home - and yes, it was surprisingly small and a bit underwhelming (and not really globular at all!). But I thought that might just be a one-off. I know sometimes roses produce smaller blooms when under heat or water stress. This was the bloom:

She HAS been growing steadily - just getting taller & taller from her 3 existing canes - so she looks very lanky now. But she's healthy & lush, so I'm just trying to be patient. She's the only rose I put in a pot as I read that Bourbons get disease very easily so I thought I could give her more special care this way... but perhaps that's holding her back.

Oh, and yes, I do have Evelyn! :-) Actually, I don't like her bloom form much (don't like the flat quartered form) and the colour seems a bit insipid... but my husband loved the perfume and the name also has special significance, so I decided to get her.

These are all the roses I have so far:

Pat Austin

Golden Celebration

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Jubilee Celebration

Princess Alexandra of Kent

Lady of Shalott

Windemere

John Clare

Evelyn

Abraham Darby

Jude the Obscure

.

- and I also got:

Nahema

Pierre de Ronsard (Eden)

The Fairy (dark pink sport)

Reine Victoria

Blushing Iceberg

.

~ HY

Haha - Karen, I love your phrase "happy madness"! That sounds like the perfect garden style to me!

And I was also chuckling at everyone who said my garden looked organised & planned... actually, it's not at all! Mostly, my "planning" is called "Buy whatever new delivery arrived at the garden centre when I walked in - and then try to find a place to plant it".

The thing is, it's all such a novelty to me still - I feel like a child in a sweet shop and I keep wanting to try every flavour - haha! So I tend to buy 1 of every new kind of plant, just to try growing it and see. I actually think my garden could be called "junk shop style" since there's so little cohesion and it's just a big mish-mash of one of everything!

I AM a sucker for anything pink - basically, if it has pink flowers on it, it's coming home with me! ;-)

Rosylady - yes, I've got both climbers trained: Nahema on a trellis against the house wall and Pierre de Ronsard against the wooden fence. I was planning to post about them separately and show photos. I'm actually really surprised by their growth - I'd read that climbers don't do anything the first year so I wasn't expecting much - but they've both produced new basal canes that are over 6 feet long and have also both flowered a bit.

~ HY

Newbie, I think Reine Victoria will just need more time to settle in than your Austins. The OGRs have their own special charms.

Thank you, Sheila. I will definitely try to be more patient! :-)

Newbie, I agree with you about Iceberg. It's a blackspotted mess here, and the blooms have pink spots on them. But I see great photos of it elsewhere. My son gave me a standard Iceberg (it looked beautiful when it arrived!), and I have to keep spraying it or it looks awful.

I love your hollyhocks too. I've tried them here, even the yellow Russian one, but with no success. Except for one called 'Nigra', I think. It grew to about 10' but not upwards. It twisted itself around anything it could, and had a stem a good 2" in diameter. It looked totally feral!

Tea roses should do very well where you are - if you ever get a larger garden! Billy Teabag (on HMF) lives in WA, I think, and she grows some beauties. She's one of the authors of 'Tea roses for warmer climates'.

Newbie no more. Your garden is exquisite. Your border gives me a good idea for edging

I have been back and forth on Abe. Yours inspires me to give it a try . Really a lovely garden.

Haha! Titian - I really laughed at the description of your "feral" hollyhock! I could just picture it in my mind!! Do you have a photo? I'd love to see it!

Yes, my hollyhocks have been a LOT of bother too. As I said, they've had rust and spider mites and white flies and every-other-pest-in-the-garden... the lower leaves turn yucky & yellow and fall off, leaving bare knees... and the individual flowers only really last a day... but still, I really love them. :-) I've cut down all the big "first" stalks now as I read online that this will encourage new - shorter - stalks to grow from the base and that seems to be working. So hopefully I'll get another crop of flowers before the summer is over.

Do you know if they'll flower again next year? Should I leave them in the ground or dig them up and start again with new seedlings for next year? I know normally, they're biennials so you leave them the first year - but mine have all flowered now in their first year so I don't know if that means they're finished?

Oh, I'd LOVE to try and teas and other OGR's but sadly, I think I'm already running out of garden space. At least, of the prime spots for roses... I really only have a tiny garden, with very narrow beds.

.

Kristine - thank you for the compliment! :-) I'm sad to report that I had a look at my Abraham Darby yesterday and oh dear - he DOES have some blackspot on the lower leaves!! :-( It's only very little and the overall bush is still very green & healthy and he's blooming again... but it's a bit ominous that he's doing this in hot, dry, summer weather. So it seems everybody is right about his disease susceptibility. Just thought I'd let you know so you're prepared - I hope he does well for you, though!

~ HY

NewbieRoseLover, the flowers of the true old roses do tend to be smaller than the modern Austin reproduction roses. Sometimes I think they need a special setting where they won't be upstaged. Regarding the size of Reine Victoria here is a picture: http://ullam.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/dscn3286.jpg

The bush grows rather upright but still full of flowers when happy. The blossoms are so beautifully poised you forget their rather small diameter. As they age they appear to glow from within. I agree that your specimen is immature and needs to grow some more canes.

Thank you so much, Monarda! That's really helpful to know - and I like your idea of giving her a "special setting" :-) Yes, I did think the 1 bloom was gorgeous, even if a bit smaller, and I didn't mind that. I think I'm just disappointed that she hasn't bloomed more since. She only seems to be growing from tthe tips of the existing 3 canes, getting longer & taller!

Do you think she's being held back because she's in a pot? It is a fairly large one. I thought I'd be able to keep her healthier if she was in a pot by herself, rather than mixed into my (very crammed!) garden beds, surrounded by lots of other foliage.

~ HY

I might think the in ground planting would be better, but of course I defer to others in your area for their local opinion, Newbie HY.

Some years ago, maybe 10, there was a bush of Reine Victoria growing at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden that I remember seeing in August, full of flowers. It was in the eastern end, an area with a bit of afternoon shade. Next to it was Autumn Damask, also in flower, and a few others I don't remember. At a certain point there was some rose rosette disease in parts of the garden and they took all the roses out. Now they have been replaced and the garden is glorious (at least it was last June), but the older bushes are pretty much all gone. Anyway, if it is very hot where you live, a bit of afternoon shade might not be amiss.