Dear lola-lemon, diane_nj and jaxondel! Thank you so much for your feedback and help! I appreciate it so much! LOLA: Thank you for the compliment about my Pergola :-) I too see lots of potential in it :-) and am eager to put it to good use! Thank you for recommending helpmefind.com this is a really cool website and I found such beautiful flowers on it! "pierre de ronsard" sounds so pretty already! It still is one of my top favourites! Now I am trying to find out if there is a way I would be able to maybe bring the roses indoor over the winter...at least the first few... I don't know yet. Maybe if I lean trellises up the sides leading to the pergola roof and then take the containers with trellis and roses indoor. For the Clematis I am lucky because I have another additional roof from which I can see the top of the pergola so it might even ass some extra beauty to have Clematis bloom on the top? I have, and am still considering wisteria, thank you! I have just read so many things of them being such an "aggressive" grower and it made me a little shy away from them! I do love the amethyst one and have read that I could grow these in containers! I wouldn't want to do any harm to a plant so if growing roses which I fell SO IN LOVE WITH would be too risky, Wisteria definitely would be my go to choice! With some lavender close by in other containers :-) DIANE: thank you so much for the great resource! I have been browsing the Manhattan Rose Society and am thrilled!! I heard of covering the containers and bottom of the roses with blankets and such over the winter, do you think that would be sufficient? For the size of containers I could have any size built I would need! I will get in touch with people at the society certainly someone will know! JAXONDEL: That's a thought I didn't even consider until now! Thank you for making me aware! the picture shows the view on to the top of the Pergola from the higher roof level:

Thanks everyone. My gardener and his crew are great, and don't worry - they are appreciated. It's just that I have no gardening expertise and when I came home and saw my pergola and trellis denuded I was literally in tears. I have enjoyed looking at them all through the winter, dead as they were. I will now take a deep breath and accept that there will be a time of year where my pergola and trellis will be somewhat denuded, in the interest of maintaining the pretty white wooden backdrop. Although I respect my gardener, he is self-taught and so I thought it was entirely possible that there were options out there of which he was not aware (or which the PO rejected for some reason). Having explored and googled a bit and read your comments, we will sit tight with what we have. Hose - LOL, thank you. We deserve no credit for the scences you see; and they are a key part of the entire magical look of this property which compelled us to but the house and move our family here totally on a lark! The contractor did replace the vines, btw. I will post a link with more photos for you. Natal - not too humid here in CT. I like the green moss myself, but I guess the clematis against true white is even niceer. Woody - yes, its scented. It was cut back pretty much to the top of the columns. Duly noted on the roses. I think i might have New Dawn elsewhere already. It is very pale pink and smells wonderful! I am just finding my way with our property, which is extensively landscaped. I hired a landscape architect who had done our old home, and his ideas were way too formal and structured. So I've not implemented them. Then I got someone at my local nursey to draw plans for some beds on the far side of the pond. They were not woodland at all, and they had way too much variety of plant material for an area I want to be pretty but natural. I can tell this is going to be a long process getting everything the way I want it and, as always, there is no substitute for the unbiased expertise of GW. Thanks!

I would plant in the ground as it's just easier, and there are a number of vines that will get tall enough to climb to the top of and over your pergola. Managing plants in pots is more challenging than planting in the ground. Regardless of what you plant, you will want to provide wires or wire mesh or pegs for the vines to climb up your verticals since most vines twine and can't grip something as large as your posts, and this would apply to all the vines I am suggesting. Check out the native trumpet honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens, particularly the cultivar 'Major Wheeler'. It would be at least semi-evergreen in your area, and in my garden has a massive flush of bloom in late May-June, but then it continues to flower throughout the summer on any new growth right up until hard freeze. Unfortunately, no scent, but the hummingbirds love it. Regardless of what you plant, you will want to provide wires or wire mesh or pegs for the vines to climb up your verticals since most vines twine and can't grip something as large as your posts. Wisteria is stunning when it is blooming and the Asian types are nicely scented, but requires vigilant pruning and can send up vigorous suckers and seed-grown plants quite a distance from the mother plant. Many folks find it difficult to control. It blooms for just a few weeks in spring. I am partial to Clematis, though they mostly aren't scented. You would need to choose varieties that grow to several meters such as Betty Corning or many of the other viticella hybrids. Pruning is easy for the viticella hybrids - just chop them off to a couple of sets of buds per stem in early spring before they leaf out, and they will have grown tall again within just a few weeks.

Mrs T, among the choices you list I'd recommend Laguna and Awakening as the quickest to grow and the longest blooming, with the best hardiness ratings. New Dawn grows fast for some people but mine was four years old and only knee high - it also died over the winter. Jasmina is iffy hardy in our zone (surprisingly) and Viking Queen isn't cane hardy and is slow to recover from the winter for me. Quick Silver is new to me but looks VERY good out of the box. What I'd do is plant at least one rose on each side of your arch so you can get them to meet in the middle to cover it faster. The light pink of Awareness and dark pink of Laguna would go together reasonably well. You can put more than one climber on each end if you're indecisive (smile) and let the best rose win the race to the top! Cynthia