Hi Connie, I'm still planning to be there the 6th and 8th. I'm soooo looking forward to it. Today was Home and Garden Day here in Lynchburg and I had looked forward to it since last year. DH got sick last week and had surgery Thursday. We are still in the hospital, so.... I missed the tour. He is doing well and if he continues to improve we may be home by the weekend. I'm so thankful he came through ok. He has been through so much health-wise in the last 2 years. Hopefully he will be with me at the Festival. I feel the same way you do...Is it May yet? BTW.. DH and I were talking today and we are going shopping for flowers as soon as he feels up to it to make up for missing the Garden tour. YEA!!!! Plus, you know I've got to buy roses at the festival ;o) The only downer to all of this is DH won't be able to dig ANY holes for all of these plants. Wonder how much I have to pay 16 year old DS to dig! lol See ya there, Betty

We looked at that rose yesterday and think the tree is probably "only" 50-60 feet high,and the rose is going up 40 feet or a bit more. There's still room at the top for the rose to climb, and we believe that it will reach the top, and cascade down once it has no more place to grow. Ann, I think you are right about the microclimate. The cemetery was originally a sand hill, created from the Sacramento river. Its high ground, in a city second only to New Orleans in risk of flooding, is why the cemetery was established there in 1850. Up at the top of the hill, where the banksiae is planted, is the sandiest soil of all. The curator has always suspected that the water table is pretty high. When we have removed roses, we are sometimes astonished at how big and deep the roses grow. I told some of the sheriff's crew to remove an Alberic Barbier, and went to lunch. When I checked on them, they were standing chest-high in the hole, still digging! It is a cemetery, for heaven's sake - we don't want to dig TOO deep! - so I had them stop, even though there were still substantial roots to be seen. Many of our roses grow bigger in the cemetery than elsewhere. We don't prune hard, we rarely feed, and we do usually provide regular, weekly water. But it must be something about the microclimate/microsoil. A funny thing about that banksiae - it's only been there a dozen years, and I'm told that a volunteer cut it off a few years after it was planted. All of that growth is from the last eight or nine years. Anita

Sherry, I have been pondering your comment about my garden taking a back seat, and indeed it has - but it's by my choice. I much prefer gardening in a public place, with other people working with me and coming to see the garden. The cemetery rose garden is three acres, with a lot of sun and well-drained sandy loam soil, while my home garden is small and rather shady and has dense clay soil, soggy in the winter and hard as a rock in summer despite years of soil amendment. I enjoyed planning my garden, but tweaking and maintaining it isn't nearly as rewarding as caring for the cemetery garden. I also like managing people - that's what I did for a living. It's a lot different to do it with volunteers rather than paid employees, and I've learned that I need both a smile in my face and in my heart to do it effectively. I do have a nice garden at home, and this is the time of year when I have an illusion of control over it. While it's not my main focus, it still gives me pleasure. I am reluctant to have strangers come see it because I'm pretty well known as a Master Gardener and garden writer and rose garden manager, and it's very hard to live up to their expectations. But I happily share it with friends, family and fellow rose lovers - just not garden tours! About dealing with the early stages of a garden - because we have so much room in the cemetery, the roses were mostly planted with plenty of space to grow. Having the burial plots cleared of weeds and planted with roses was such an improvement that I don't think there was any pressure to make it look like a conventional garden. There was almost no pruning of the roses in the first several years. I think that I first visited it three or four years after its establishment, and it looked both barren and overgrown, with big unruly roses surrounded by weeds and wood chips. We've done a huge amount of work adding companion plants, including annuals that self-seed and perennials. That takes volunteer time to maintain them, of course. We volunteers primarily work on the roses, of course, but we like the big unruly look and focus on the roses being healthy and not blocking pathways or monuments. The garden is still mostly roses and wood chips, with plenty of weeds, but it looks more like a garden now than it did before. The cemetery went from roses only to roses with companion plants - at home, my experience was more like Jeri's with the Stagecoach Garden (which is a little gem). I filled in with perennials and annuals and the garden was quite pretty in early days while the roses got established, but it's changed a lot as the roses and trees have shaded and crowded some of the planting beds. It still is pretty but it's not got the variety that it once has - the roses dominate. Anita

Would be fun to attend if I lived closer! If you ever can get someone to volunteer to do a youtube video of the class I am sure there would be a lot of interest.