Beautiful. I like your small tree too, I presume it's a Frangipani? maybe not..

Please tell me about 'John Clare' with photos when you have the time. It's one I've often thought about..

Very lovely! I also grow Golden celebration, as well as the original The Fairy (which my daughter picked because of the name). I enjoy both of them very much. Yours are lovely, your GC is very fat and sassy! Mine is a great favorite of the local bunnies and hasn’t gotten very bushy. I love the smell though, my favorite non rosey, rose fragrance.

I love your garden and wish you could design mine! It's nice that you can make flower arrangements for the house, because otherwise you might not want to ever step inside. Thanks for sharing the wide shot views.

As I'm hoping you'll be a continuous presence on the forum here, would you mind sharing your first name with us? I can't call you newbie, since you're obviously not, as evidenced by your garden. There's not much to look at in my garden now, but when there was I was constantly taking pictures and forcing everyone here to look at the same old roses that they'd seen dozens of times before. We now have a new infusion of roses from you, and you'll have to share them all with us. Your roses look so fresh and healthy, and I assume you have more rainfall than mine (which is close to zero in our drought conditions). Being a lover of cool pink tones, I like your version of The Fairy more than the original, and it looks wonderful in your garden. It's a nice contrast to the big, fat blooms of the Austins, and at least you know it won't morph into the Jolly Green Giant. We hope to see more!

Very beautiful, Newbie! You’re absolutely correct about me loving that combination. I do! I have a sport of “The Fairy”, that I’m rather fond of, myself. It’s a little on the bright side for me, though. I like yours better. I keep intending to move it, because it doesn’t really fit with the color scheme of peachy pinks, blues, white, and yellow that I’m trying to achieve in that bed. It’s very happy there, and very prickly, so I keep putting it off. I noticed it had formed a new plant where a portion of cane had somehow gotten a shovelful of soil dumped on it, so now it appears I have two to move. Mine is a bright raspberry pink, and the blooms fade and dry to a lovely color. The sport that I have is called, “Lovely Fairy”. I wonder what yours is? I ought to go see if mine has any blooms on it now, so we can compare. Mine blooms well in quite a bit of shade. I wonder if it would lighten up in color with more sun?

Everything looks just fabulous! You’re making me eye my jungle with discontent. lol I don’t think you will have to wait too long for your Golden Celebration to reach the fence for some training. I have a feeling it will grow pretty large for you. I must compliment your color and plant choices again. I really love all of your photos, and look forward to more. You can’t over do the pictures! Lisa

Lovely! More inspiration welcome. I'm calling you H.Y. until further advised. You flunked newbie, Ingrid is right.

Very pretty, HY. I specially love the corner with Golden Celebration. In a previous lifetime, I used to have the original The Fairy, and I do remember how thorny it was!

Well, I will never get tired of looking at flowers and roses.

I am going to start guessing you name

First initial is H. So, here is my list

Heidi, Helen, , Hellen, Hope, Heather Holly, Hailey , Hazel.

Well, I think that is all I can think but if you are Male. Then all above is wrong.....lol

So, it is your turn.

Ingrid you are welcome. I am trying...lol

HY....ahem, what is it ?:)

Jin

I'm so glad you posted more pictures! I think part of what makes your flowers look so vibrant is the light colored walls that enclose your garden. It's very pretty!

And Graham Thomas is such a good choice for a shadier corner...the color brightens it up. Hopefully he will like that spot...it will look fabulous trained on the fence and wall.

I'm looking forward to more pictures!

Thank you so much, everybody - and you really shouldn't encourage me with photos, you know - haha - you'll live to regret it!

Oh, and I didn't mean to be mysterious about my first name. It's "Hsin-Yi" - it's Chinese and difficult to pronounce & spell for most people, so I usually don't mind if they just use my initials "HY". It's also the pen name I write under (I'm an author).

And I really am a newbie - that was why I picked that name initially for the forum - I only started gardening last May (2017) - before that, I never had the confidence to try & grow anything, because I always killed everything I brought home. Seriously. (Even the plastic plants! LOL)

But then I sort of had an epiphany early last year - I thought: I'm always looking wistfully at other people's gardens and always wishing I could buy the beautiful fresh cut flowers in florists (but they're so expensive & die in a few days, so it's such an extravagance!)... why didn't I just try to create my own dream garden?? Plus I hated the tangled brown mess that was the existing garden we'd inherited when we bought the house. It was a native Australian garden so it as mostly prickly, spindly bushes & grasses in various shades of brown & olive green. I really wanted a romantic cottage garden filled with colour - and I always thought it was impossible, because I never knew anything about plants. I even had no idea what a "perennial" was! I would look blankly at flowers & shrubs out in the park and had no idea what their names were (other than the really obvious ones like sunflowers or tulips or roses.)

And then I decided maybe it was only impossible because I had never tried properly. If I really set my mind to learn and put in a proper effort, maybe I could actually grow things. (Maybe it's getting older - haha - and you feel like life is too short - if you don't try, you'll die anyway!) So I started spending hours on the internet reading everything I could (I found Garden Web!) and also reading books and watching videos on Youtube. And I went down to my local garden centre and started buying things that took my fancy (usually everything pink - haha!). I was like a child in a candy shop who had never tasted sweets before - wanting to try every flavour! :-) My husband was very supportive and kept telling me - what's the worst that can happen? The plants die - you try again!

I started with the "potted colour" that was available from the garden centres - they're very cheap and they were already fairly mature, ready for planting straight into the garden - I just had to keep them alive - haha! I got things like pansies and petunias and stocks and impatiens and alyssum and lobelia (lots and lots of colour at last!)... and I started to gain confidence. Then I moved up to bigger, more permanent things (perennials - yes, I'd learned the term now! LOL) - like salvias and lavender and heuchera and plectranthus (I love those! They grow & bloom in total shade and have beautiful purple flowers). And then I "discovered" roses (mainly because of this forum - haha!) - and the rest, as they say, is history ;-)

And I was lucky that I started all this in our winter, which is the kindest season in Perth. There is regular rainfall then and although it's still sunny most days, the sun is a lot weaker & gentler. Also, I don't have children or other commitments and I work from home - so I have a lot of time to devote to the garden. I was spending 2 - 4hrs out there every day, just planting things, moving things around, pruning & trimming, and learning. I found that I learned a lot just from observing the plants every day - seeing how they grow, how they bloom & fade, etc, etc. - it was actually better than all the books & online articles I read - there's no substitute for real life experience! :-)

And yes, I did kill several things - some I'm very sad about - but it's OK, I've learned from my mistakes. I'm better at not over- or under-watering things now or planting too close together.

By the way, as I said in my Charles Rennie Mackintosh thread, I have tried to change my forum name but Houzz doesn't seem to let me. It's very frustrating. Every time I change the "First Name" field and click on "Update" - it seems to go through - but then my forum name remains the same. I don't know how to fix it. Oh well - I really am a newbie still. I still have LOTS to learn! :-)

~ HY

ps. oh, here's a picture of the garden just after I ripped out all the native bushes & grasses and before I started planting new things. You can see some stocks & alyssum in pots ready for planting. They were the first things I planted and I was so excited! :-) This was taken in Jun 2017.

As you can see, it's only very small - just a few narrow beds, really. I think it's why I'm able to keep on top of things and keep everything neat. It's the only upside of a tiny garden, I think!

That is a wonderful story of how you got started HY. It was in you all along.

Ooh, ooh, dear Newby, have you signed up for the Heritage Rose Australia conference and tour near year's end? Perth to Albany, then back (via another route) to Perth. There's a group of us coming from California, maybe from elsewhere in the U.S. Love to meet you. In my opinion, your garden should be on the tour!

Oh my goodness, Dana that is so wonderful and going from one place to another in Australia . You have to tell us all about it after your tour. So interesting and I envy you doing that.

HY you have to look at the 'tour'. It will be fun and meet more Rosarians . I wish I can join you guys....

HY, you sound just like me. I have a lot of encouragement from a lot of Rosarians here on this forum. This is my first batch. My roses never grows and end up going to sky. I been buying flowers most of my life.

I love Golden Celebration and Jubilee also. I can't wait to get mine. I have so many DA's coming and spring can't come fast enough...lol.

I also love antiques roses. Keep posting pics. They are gorgeous.

Jin

Haha...all my H names all wrong. I think I can pronounce your name really well. Half of my family is Chinese. My cousin's, my nieces and nephews. My dad spoke Mandarin and Cantonese well.

P.S. my husband said same exact words as yours to you.

Jin

Ooh, Dara - how exciting! I'd never heard of the Heritage Rose Australia before - I must look it up! I would love to join fellow rose lovers and view gardens on the tour - perhaps not the whole thing but certainly the part in Perth. (And thank you so much for the compliment about my garden :-) )

Marlorena - yes, that little tree is a frangipani (plumeria) - it was one of the earliest things I planted when we first moved in the house. There had been a native peppermint tree growing in that spot which inexplicably just turned brown & died, so I had to replace it - and a frangipani was recommended. It's got beautiful pink flowers, although it's not really fragrant.

Oh, and I'll share my photos of John Clare next! :-)

Karen - I love that phrase "fat and sassy" - haha! And yes, Golden Celebration has one of my favourite fragrances. I think Jude is my favourite, followed by Golden Celebration and Windemere.

Ingrid - we get hardly any rain in the summer months but we do get rain in winter - so I think that's more than you? It must be so hard for you to cope with the drought conditions. We do have water restrictions in summer - we're only allowed to run the drip irrigation twice a week - but we can water by hand as much as we like, and in the last month, I've been out there almost every day carrying buckets of collected waste water from the kitchen & bathroom out to the roses.

Rosylady - yes, I think you're right! I'm very lucky that the previous owners chose the light stone walls and had the house painted white. It's actually brick but covered with a white plaster coating, and it does keep everything light and bright. In fact, in mid-summer, I find it a bit too dazzling to look out sometimes as the sun reflects off the walls and there's a terrible glare. But it does help all the colours stand out!

~ HY

Lisa - I think the colour of my Fairy sport could probably be described as "raspberry" too? It starts off very dark, but quickly fades through bright bubblegum pink to a very pale, almosty dirty white kind of pink. I think the name is "Gorgeous Fairy" - although I tried to Google that and came up with nothing.

Yes, I'd love to see some photos of yours and compare the colours! I also think when you view/photograph them makes a bit difference - whether in the sun or bright shade or low afternoon light.

And yes, I think it's supposed to be quite shade-tolerant. That was another reason I put it in that location as that end of the middle bed doesn't get any sun in winter - because it's shaded by the house - and even in summer, has less sun hours than higher up the garden. It's still getting 6hrs+ at the moment - but it will be interesting to see if it still blooms as much when winter arrives.

This is the one that was growing at the rose nursery which caught my eye...

~ HY

HY I really love your enthusiasm. It’s a great story of how you got started! It’s wonderful to get to know you.

Trying new things brings a sense of childlike wonderment, doesn’t it? I think we are all newbies as we discover new plants to try in our gardens. No worries about changing your name. One could say that it expresses how you are constantly trying new things, a never ending discovery and adventure. ;-)

Well, imagine that! I’ve just learned how to do something new! I was able to upload the photo from the text to my idea book on Houzz. Now I really must post it, although it’s unnecessary after I’ve already posted the first one. I’m happy to know how to do that, now! Handy! Lisa

Lovely Fairy sent to sister Ingrid for Natalie’s bouquet. · More Info

HY...thank you for posting more pictures! and for telling the story of how you got into gardening. It's very interesting to hear the personal background of how gardens are created.

Lisa...how kind of you to donate your roses for your niece's special occasion!

Oh, Lisa - that's such a nice meaning that your niece was using your roses in her formal. Your sister must have loved having such beautiful raw materials to work from!

You know, I think my Fairy sport is the same as yours. The colours look so similar, especially in the first picture you posted. It's gorgeous! And really good to know that it blooms so well, even in shade.

I did some more Googling today and came across this page talking about The Fairy sports - and it only lists 3, with Lovely Fairy being the "bright pink" one (they also listed "Crystal Fairy" (white) and "Fairy Queen" (red)... there's no mention of a "Gorgeous Fairy". I must ask them again the next time I go to that rose nursery.

https://www.nzroses.org.nz/october-the-fairy/

~ HY

They do look similar, HY. I can easily see how someone could substitute the word “gorgeous” for “Lovely”. They mean the same thing, after all. I think yours will bloom fine in shade. Mine sure does. I also love the way the blooms dry if picked when fresh and bright. They get a great “antique” look to them, sometimes with mauve tinges. It also blooms year round, here. Hopefully it will for you as well. Our climates are very similar, so there’s a good chance it will. Lisa