Great news on Tom’s recovery! And the garden plans sound very promising—I love that color scheme! :-)

Best wishes on Tom's recovery. I love the idea of more whites and I never thought of it as bringing the green more. Loving the idea very much . Good luck and hope to see the pics one day :)

Jin

Sounds good to me. I have an area in the yard where the color scheme somewhat accidentally worked out to cool green, white, gray-blue, cream, and it is definitely refreshing in the summer heat.

I wish Tom all the best, so glad he's recovering nicely. Your color scheme sounds lovely, especially to one who is drowning in a sea of pink. Lady Hillingdon sounds perfect with white. Can't wait to see pictures!

I’m glad Tom is recovering well, and that you had a lovely spot to enjoy while he was hospitalized. Your plans sound wonderful! I also have decided that I need more white in the garden. I’ve been struggling with the combination of pure white blooming flowers and off white/cream colored flowers. Do you plan to use both, or stick with the true whites? I like the look of both, but I’m not sure about combining them. Maybe separating them with something else helps? Lisa

Rosefolly, I love your plan

This year I brought in several whites and they glow. I always think that white is under used.

This year I added 2 white Rose of Sharon for something to break up all of my roses.

I cant wait to see how it all turns out.

Im glad your husband is on the mend.

Thanks for all the kind wishes for Tom. Surgery is always scary.

Kristine, I too think white is underused. I didn't used to be interested in it but have become more and more attracted to it in recent years.

Melissa, how nice to have such a happy accident. I love it when things come together all by themselves like that.

Ingrid, I like yellow with white, too. Lady H can go from deep yellow to cream depending on the time of year.

Jin, far too soon for pictures. All you'd see these days would be holes where I removed plants. Everything new is still pretty small.

Lisa, I just don't know. I just struggled with the shades of white to paint the walls of our house. It is true that not all whites are the same. I'm planning to aim for true white when I can but realize that I won't always get it. I can always move something that doesn't work. It's not as though I've never done it!

Sheila and Perma, it is an adventure. I think I was getting bored with my old version of the garden.

Rosefolly

"A garden that is finished is a garden that is dead." I forget who said that, but agree. No risk of our garden dying anytime soon if that's the criterion.

Really, I was so seized with the possibilities of color scheming that I forgot about Tom's surgery. Pass on to him my good wishes! We're a bit creaky here, so I know, both that joint damage happens, and that one can recover from it. I hope he heals well and gets back to his activities in good time.

I agree with you about there being different whites. Personally I've never cared for brilliant white in flowers, rugosas being the only roses that have this color. I go for the many varieties that are white tinged buff or pink or honey: 'Mme. Alfred Carriere' and 'Sharifa Asma' both read white to me; 'Mme. Jules Bouche' and 'Mme. Zoetmans' are two other examples. Indubitably white roses like 'Alba Maxima' still manage to avoid that eye-scouring chill brilliance of rugosas and (for example) ox-eye daisies. A rose that is really white and yet not brilliant is the musk rose. I call this a milky white, and don't know how the color achieves that effect. 'Dupontii', supposed to be an offspring, is pink upon opening (it took my sister to point this out to me) but turns a similar milky white.

Rosefolly I think it sounds great. Pass on my best wishes to your husband. I hope he heals fast.

I just started really adding whites to my garden last year. So waiting for them to mature. I have a fortuniana rose that I got from bluegirl. It's getting pretty big. Getting mature. It gets covered in blooms every year. And every year the late frost take them. I did finally see 2 or 3 blooms this year that somehow escaped the frost. I do also have some more white ramblers in the ground. But they are small still. Mostly I'm waiting on the garden to mature.

There are some more gallicas and hybrid chinas I would like to add as well. I'm obsessed with these beauties. They are still the ones I look most forward to in Spring. They make my heart flutter, and bring a smile to my face just thinking about them IMO there is no comparison. I love all of my Rose's, but I am in love with my hybrid chinas and gallicas.

My favorite white is Bolero. It has lovely green foliage and blooms continuously.

And then there are white fillers

I just ordered Desdamona and recently planted Earth Angel

I guess I am on a white kick right now so pretty excited to see how your new plantings work out.

It's not just color that is changing, but form as well.

Down from 21 to 14 roses in the front garden (many others on the fence and the porch garden in the back). The roses are mostly climbers and located all along the edges. I truly am getting my "walls of roses" that I had in mind when I first began this garden back in 1996 or so, which by no coincidence is when I started posting on Gardenweb. In the space between the roses are/will be three small trees. The largest is an established tree-form crape myrtle, and newly planted two smaller Magnolia stellata 'Royal Star'. I bought one as a 15 gallon plant to get some size going. It is too late to make it a single trunk tree, but I pruned it down to the three best trunks. As it grows I'll keep it pruned to an open form with the branching high. I want to create dappled shade, not Mirkwood Forest. Think multi-stemmed tree, not shrub. The other is still on order, a younger 5 gallon plant so I ought to be able to train it to a single trunk. In between all this will be mostly lower growing plants, ankle high and knee high with occasional taller exclamation points - foxgloves, lilies, maybe a few delphiniums, with a few clematis plants trained on airy wire supports- Asao, Gillian Blades, Rhapsody, and Gipsy Queen. That last one is really too dark a purple for the color scheme but very pretty. At this point I am keeping a of the few dark purples and I will evaluate the effect as things fill in. I am taking out my 'Purple Dome' asters and replacing them with 'Wood's Blue'.

To my eye this all adds a sense of clarity and peace to the garden. It had begun to look jumbled even when freshly weeded and deadheaded. I want more of fewer plants. My new rule is to plant perennials in 5's or 7's instead of 3's. It's hard to change. I have to keep reminding myself.

We'll see how well it goes in time. I may need to tweak it further, but this feels like a good start.

Rosefolly

It sounds wonderful, Rosefolly, eminently sensible and doable, which will result, I'm sure, in a truly gorgeous space. I can only repeat - pictures!

I like the sound of your plans, too: abundance--climbing roses are great for this if you don't have unlimited space or garden help--and clarity. And shade, a feature that I appreciate more with every blazing summer that passes.