HY... I so appreciate you taking the time and trouble to tell us all about this rose, which I absolutely love from your photos incidentally, including that fuchsia pink, I don't mind that at all, I enjoy things that really stand out...the blooms look quite large too, but it's a shame there is no scent but I could live with that. I also have very narrow borders, to tall and upright is kind of pre-ordained..

In your garden though, I might try and train those canes sideways a bit, then you get breaks further along the canes, like twist them around something... just a thought with that.. might benefit from a small obelisk next to it...

That's probably what I would do here if I had it...

Lovely garden HY... small can be beautiful...

I have never heard of john Clare but he is beautiful! What I can't get over the most is the beautiful companion plants you have . It's very inspirational! This year is going to be my year of companion plants, as I hardly have any . Boy do they fill out your garden so nice and pull it all together . I have been really enjoying your posts !

I think I'm going to have to get it at some point, Frances... thanks for that... most informative.. he's been on my mind for about 3 years...

Beautiful rose in a gorgeous garden, HY. Thank you for the wonderful pictures and detailed information about this rose. I'd always heard that this is one of Austin's best bloomers but hadn't ever seen good pictures. You've remedied that nicely. With his habit of growth, I might be able to squeeze John in somewhere, assuming I can find him.

Disappointing news for me, I had forgotten that David Austins here in England have dropped this rose from their collection and no longer offer it, in fact it doesn't appear to be available anywhere except from a German supplier...

I think now I recall it was on their supplementary list some time ago, but now it's gone... oh well, I shall just have to enjoy yours HY... thanks anyway for highlighting this lovely rose..

That is horrible, marlorena. Do any nurseries there offer the discontinued Austins as some do here? I'd never heard of this rose til today, but am very interested in its BS resistance in addition to its beauty.

HY, you garden is lovely and I'm hitting my head against a wall because even in a zillion years mine will never look so pretty. The only things that seems to like it here are weeds and black-eyed susans which look horrible with my roses.

Hy , gorgeous pictures of John Clare. I love that color. Made me look him up and it is sold here by DA. How does it smell ? It says on Da medium scent.

It is light color in winter but summer it is becomes really pink. I love the idea it blooms long seasons. Now, I am thinking of getting him but still unsure when. I have to many DA's coming and my list is like a mile long....haha

I am glad , you pick him at the nursery. Great choice !

Jin

Marlorena, I am sorry too. I won't give up maybe someone can give you a cutting or something. I hope you will find him. Keep looking. Maybe , a small nursery might be out of stock and has a mother plant. Just stay positive :)

Vaporvac, I am like you. I am also hitting my head on the wall. HY,you have a beautiful garden.

I been working really hard in my backyard digging and digging. The last 2 weekends and just I bed ( 27 ft by 7) is almost completed and 4 to go. Making flower beds. I am so sore and my arms are so heavy. YIKES!!!

I wish HY and Marlorena can design my backyard...lol.

Jin

Vaporvac/Jin.. no we cannot get older Austins... once they are discontinued then stock cannot be replenished so they disappear... something to do with licensing and plant breeders rights..

Never mind, there will be another 3 new ones along shortly, in May... I'll have a look at those..

! Just lost my post. We have the same thing Marlorena, except they can still be sold under their patent name and only by those not licensed to sell current varieties. I look forward to hearing about the latest varieties.

Jin, you going to have the best looking arms! It's still too cold here for me to dig so I'm getting my excitement from all your posts. I get nervous thinking of everything I still need to do so maybe I'll just start removing the leaves from the roses.

I can comment on BS resistance, at least the variety in my region. I've grown John Clare for many years but in the last couple of years I have backed off from routine use of fungicide. So I'll be eliminating varieties that are the worst for BS resistance. By this I mean an otherwise mature and healthy rose, growing in good conditions, which spends the majority of the summer with most to all of its leaves covered with BS, or else defoliates.

So...John Clare had clean foliage when sprayed (with propiconazole) but is a miserable mess without it. So he'll be a goner this year, sadly though, because in my garden he had that well known reputation of being perhaps the most reliable DA bloomer - even when bare of foliage!

It does seem to me that DA is dropping some of the more disease prone varieties, but as we all know, rose foliage diseases are very location specific. You really need to understand your own conditions and I love that these rose forums are a place to learn from a wide variety of experiences.

Your garden is so beautiful!

Thank you so much everybody for the kind words and compliments! :-) I'm so pleased you enjoyed the photos.

Oh no, Marlorena - I'm so sorry you can't get John Clare! How frustrating! Now I feel bad for telling you how great he is. Still, if ratdogheads is right, then maybe you've avoided a potentially "bad" rose :-) I have to admit, Perth is a bad place to judge disease resistance since the humidity is so low here (having said that, both Abraham Darby & Evelyn have BS spots on a few of their lower leaves... and it's mid-summer! So that's pretty poor...I shudder to think what they'll be like come winter)

On the flip side, you've got access to so may of the new DA cultivars that I'm DYING to get - like Olivia Rose Austin and the Ancient Mariner and even old ones like Royal Jubilee - so I'm really envious of you on that front!!

Oh - and thank you for the suggestion about the obelisk - I hadn't even thought of that! I will definitely look into it. I quite like John Clare as he is - narrow & blooming at the tops - as that fits well in that space in the garden... but I was thinking of using obelisks for some of my other DA roses that are probably going to get huge and I (stupidly) didn't plant them next to a wall so I can't train them as a climber... an obelisk would be a great solution there!

Frances - I'm pleased you like John Clare too and I'm delighted to hear that he has stayed compact for you! I hope he will for me too.

Lilyfinch - haha - well, actually, you see I don't think of them as "companion plants" for the roses - I see them as plants in themselves, just as important in my garden as the roses. But then I don't really like formal rose gardens - I like a cottage garden look where the roses are just part of a harmonious whole and are wedged on all sides by other plants and there is a variety of shapes & sizes & colours & textures... When I'm planning a bed, I think of all the plants equally and the roses have to fit with everything else (although they do get star billing!) but I don't put the roses first and then add other things just to enhance the roses. I think it's because I treat it like composing a painting, so all the different parts are important to make up the whole picture.

Jin - John Clare doesn't have any scent at all for me. That's one of his few drawbacks. Wow - I dream of having a 27 ft by 7 bed! Lucky you!!! I think my biggest bed is 5 x 5 and it's mostly in the shade, so I can't plant roses.

Vaporvac - thanks for the compliment! :-) Don't feel bad! You have to remember, my garden is really new and I'm still in the honeymoon phase - so I'm probably spending a lot more time & effort than I should propping everything up with a lot of TLC (I'm out there watering things every day when it gets hot and I make "ward rounds" every morning or evening, checking each plant and grooming it. Yes, I'm a bit crazy - hee! hee!) . Probably if I treated the garden like a "normal" person, a lot of the plants wouldn't survive either.

Also, a lot of these are short-term annuals & potted colour which I got "ready-grown" from the garden centre and just planted in. They probably won't last long - so as long as one doesn't mind replacing them every season, the garden always looks "nice". I haven't tried to grow anything from seed yet so I don't think I've graduated to being a "real" gardener! ;-)

Actually, I've lost quite a few things in the summer heat already. I had a gorgeous silvery-white "lambs ear" plant that I LOVED - it was such a beautiful shape with the fountain-like strappy leaves & the colour contrast amongst the other plants and the velvety surface of the leaves...

... and then one day last month, I came out into the garden and it had just collapsed! :-(

I tried to save it by giving it extra water and shading it from the sun but it was a goner. I did some research and found that they can be prone to doing that if it gets too hot - they just can't take the heat. And mine was planted in the "full-sun-all-day" bed. I was gutted as I really loved it and it was a perennial. I'm going to try and buy another one when the garden centres stock them again and plant it in a different spot which gets some shade in summer - so hopefully it might survive next year.

That's a shame, it looked recoverable from that photo but obviously not so..

I love Lamb's Ears too, the one I prefer to grow is Stachys lanata 'Silver Carpet' which rarely produces those yellow flower spikes which I don't like so much, so it's perfect for dry garden ground cover, but unlike your heat I lost mine to winter wet .. I must try again sometime..

I have 'Ancient Mariner' rose, gets better each year.. and I had 'Royal Jubilee' on an obelisk trailing along rope, but I had to remove it for house maintenance purposes, but it's the most sweetly scented Austin I know of.. and a continuous bloomer... if I don't like any of the new ones I might get it back..

Lovely photos again... oh and no bother about John Clare... you may be right and perhaps it's disease resistance wasn't what it should be...or otherwise for commercial reasons, they do that too unfortunately..