When dead isn’t dead

This is really two stories, one story of the struggle to survive and another of the tenacity of life. This is the story of ‘Bermuda’s Anna Olivier’. She’s a mystery rose found in Bermuda, a rose that no one has really been able to identify but which has survived there in fairly harsh (by rose standards) conditions. I bought her from a local nursery and planted her in my garden in March, 2009. She began beautifully, wowing me with abundant big, fat, buttercream blooms on a wonderfully healthy bush.

In 2010 and 2011 she did seem to suffer from chlorosis which I assumed was due to the nasty cement-like soil in that part of the garden. Through the summer of 2011 and into the fall she was an ugly bush that would still cover herself with blooms.

October, 2011



In the winter of 2012 I was betwixt and between digging her up to renovate the bed with better soil and just plain digging her up, but the truth was that I hated the thought of losing this beautiful rose. Still, she was losing canes right and left – in this photo, particularly on the right. She used to have a right side.

February 11th


After renovating ‘Madame Abel Chatenay’ I was not eager to repeat it for Anna, so I thought I would try boring deep holes around her and pouring milorganite and liquid humus into them. Then one day in early March I decided I would dig her up and relocate her to another part of the garden. As I was digging, I noticed what bad shape she was in. The more I would cut dead wood the more I had to cut. Digging her up proved to be too big a job for this mere woman. I couldn’t get the taproot to budge, and the more I worked at it the more damage I was doing and the more I saw how bad off she was. So I finally decided to give up on her. The kicker was that she came out of the ground in two pieces – not a broken bush but rather two bushes.

This happens occasionally. Two cuttings root in a pot and start to growing and you can’t tell there are two individuals in the same pot. In fact, it had only been days since I read about this very topic on the Antique Roses Forum, so I was astonished to see it in my garden. The problem with two plants in one hole is that their needs are only met by half. Half the space, half the nutrients, half the water. Suddenly, I understood why this bush was performing so badly. So onto the yard waste pile they went. Later that evening I was telling DH the tale of the two Anna Oliviers, and he interjected, “they were fighting each other to survive.” In a split second it hit me that one of them deserved a shot at survival. I ran out in the dark and got the bigger one out of the pile and into a big blue pot that didn’t hold the water I poured into it for very long, so I set a couple of half-full bags of soil on her roots and hoped for the best.

The next day after work I took photos of the twins, put the smaller one back on the pile, and elatedly planted my Anna Olivier in the back garden after evicting ‘Madame Joseph Bonnaire’ to a pot.

March 5th



Even in her poor overnight conditions her new growth was fine, and I was so excited to have my rose back.



The next day was a very different story. Apparently, putting her in the dirt was the wrong thing to do. She looked limp to me. And she got limper every day.

March 11th


And limper. I kept her watered and thought about posting on the Antique Roses Forum the question: when is dead really dead?

March 20th


For at least a week I had been thinking about pulling her. This past Saturday I definitely gave thought to yanking her, but she’s not a rose you yank without gloves. So on my rounds with camera on Sunday I looked at her real hard. I simply could not believe a rose would just die like that. They’re tough. Everyone knows that! But she was a crispy critter for sure.

April 1st



Then I thought I saw something green. Was it really there? I didn’t have the benefit of magnification, just my nearsighted eyes, but I knew I saw a green dot.



I looked elsewhere. There were more tiny green places.



Some not so tiny.



This one isn’t even a quarter inch long, and at the same time it was huge.



There were maybe half a dozen bits of green.



‘Bermuda’s Anna Olivier’ had decided to stay.



Today her green dots were definitely green stems.

April 3rd


This is the main cane, and it’s really vertical not leaning over.



This is the base of the main cane. How ‘bout them apples!!










Now then, would you jump to the conclusion that this bush is dead?
Better not.
Better be patient and let nature and the rose do their thing. I don’t know how much upper cane loss she’ll have, but I’m not touching her with clippers until she tells me to.



Can I hear a big amen out there for life... and the victory over death?
Happy Easter everyone!

'Parade' on the move

 

This is 'Parade' last year. My plan was to replace him with Climbing Clotilde Soupert and send him far away to the landfill.  Well, I think he's gotten wind of the shovel, because he is sprouting absolutely everywhere. So I thought about the spot I have on the northeast side of a fence that probably gets too much shade for a bush, but since 'Parade' tolerates some shade and most of him would be above the fence anyway, I thought it would be a perfect fit with the added benefit of the rather remote location making his less-than-well-foliated nature less bothersome.  Last weekend that was a great idea, but this weekend now that he's budding all over the place, I'm concerned about the damage I will do him. Sigh! He's definitely got to be moved, and roses do bounce back amazingly well. I just hope I don't hurt him too bad.  Well, maybe he won't mind the jolt of the move, and perhaps he'll just be relieved that he's got a new home and isn't mulch. He's worth saving, don't you think? And he's not even an antique.

Garden work

As usual, I didn't get done what I thought I wanted to do, but I did get stuff done. I put out the epsom salts in the back and side gardens and some of the front before I ran out. I will have to run out tomorrow and get some more. I have found that Walgreens has the best price. I paid $2.99 on sale for a 6 lb bag of very fine crystals that are easier to apply than the kind from the garden stores. I also put out sulfur on my lime-y back garden. I went to Seminole Feed to get it today and there decided to buy the wettable sulfur (very fine powder) in a 25 lb bag for $20.99 (cheaper than 4 lb of large granules for $8.99) since I've read that the finer it is the faster it lowers the pH. Just be careful not to breathe it. I did the front garden a few weeks ago with the large granule soil sulfur, so we'll see if I can see any difference. Oh, I also got a 50 lb bag of alfalfa pellets. Good stuff!!

I also moved 'Madame Scipion Cochet' out of her pot and into the ground. I should have taken a photo of this Hybrid Perpetual rose bush. She is leafless (well, there was one yellow one which I removed), but she has lots of swollen budeyes. I'm very curious about how this rose is going to grow. Her canes go out and around, or that's the way it seems so far. I also moved 'Martha Gonzales' from a 3-gallon nursery pot into a nice heavy ceramic pot that's taller and wider. This means I have only one rose in a pot that needs to be in the ground...er, at least until next weekend. That's when three new roses are coming home with me. 'Lilian Austin', 'Cl Clotilde Soupert' and 'Souv de St Anne's'. Hopefully, I'll get them in the ground the same day but maybe not.

While I was out today, I went to a nursery to get some Evergreen Giant Liriope, but instead I did a risky thing. I bought an azalea for the spot - a $9.99 azalea to be exact. Thankfully, azaleas have shallow root systems, and hopefully, the roots of this bush won't go much farther than the 16" or so that I dug down, removing the powdery fine, light gray sand that I know is bad for azaleas. The spot is right at the base of an oak tree, so I had to dig around the roots with my glove-covered fingers to get out as much bad stuff as I could. Then I sprinkled some sulfur around, added peat moss (unfortunately already pH adjusted up) and composted manure to the bottom, then filled the rest with newly amended, old amended soil that I had removed from the hole and, of course, put the azalea in the middle. This azalea is a 'Duc de Rohan'. A few weeks back I had scribbled its name on a stickie note by my computer after reading good things about it. It's a salmon pink flower, and the tag says it blooms from November to February in Florida. Maybe that's why I wanted it. I can't remember now. It's a long bloom time for an azalea. The plant I bought had spent blooms on it as well as open flowers and buds, so maybe I can believe the tag.

This area of the garden needed an evergreen bush, because there are four hydrangeas in this bed which are bare for an awfully long time. I will say though that I am starting to admire their silvery grayish branches that practically glisten when the light is right, especially the 'Limelight' hydrangea paniculata.

Oh, and I replaced the leaky hose that ran from the hose bib to the timer with 1/2" poly and two hose-end adapters. So now that section of the garden can be watered automatically again instead of using the hose and 10x more water! Of course, how much easier it would have been to have done it this way to begin with, but, alas, I didn't know what hose-end adapters were for. What can I say?

Managing rose inventory

There for a long time roses were coming in and going out at almost the same rate - or so it seemed. The end of 2009 saw some "ruthless" cleaning out, because I wanted to reduce my numbers, but spring of 2010 saw a good many newcomers. It was with a disappointed heavy sigh that I read the tabulation of ins and outs after last spring. It was a wash. I hadn't reduced my inventory at all. I so much wanted to get under 90 for the sake of my sanity. Ninety-six is way to close to 100 and lends credence to the idea that I have no self-control. Don't you think 89 has a much more reasonable ring to it? To my credit, I did have the total down to 87, but then it went up again.

Last fall the outgoings were flying out of here. I simply decided that in order to live here a rose had to meet some minimum pleasure requirements - for me. Primary on the list of requirements was canes with leaves, then canes that didn't turn black, then flowers that didn't ball all the time, then leaves that didn't blackspot all the time, then leaves that didn't cry out "I need iron" all the time, and finally plants that wouldn't at any moment engulf my entire property and dwelling. Apparently, not growing veggie centers wasn't a requirement, because I kept one that did that so there must have been another requirement that caused one exit. In both evacuations I found homes for several roses that left, but some moved on to the happy compost pile in the sky since I didn't feel it would be nice to pass them on to an unsuspecting friend.  (I've gotten quite adept at cutting them into little pieces.) Then in September and November there were more incoming. There were some Buck roses I wanted to try, and the coming closure of my favorite nursery (though admittedly temporary) pushed me to get more, totaling about eight or ten or twelve more (no need to be specific). Sigh. Back again to that magic number 96.

That brings me to yesterday. I went out to plant some more seedlings which I did do, but I made a command decision to move some roses as well and quite efficiently. Archduke Charles went into the ground from his 20-gallon pot, the last of my 'permanent container roses' experiment. He went into half of the space left by house-eater 'Cl White Maman Cochet' about whose ultimate size I was perfectly clear to her new owner. In a desperate attempt to save my investment in the Hybrid Musk 'Jeri Jennings' (shipping from California for a single rose more than doubles the price) she has a new home on the east side next to the fence kind of under 'Reve d'Or'. I'm hoping that this will be a cooler situation for her and she'll hold on to her leaves more tightly. And tiny little 'Souv de Pierre Notting' was moved out of the shade of 'E. Veyrat Hermanos' into JJ's former sunny spot. That left me with four roses in my pot ghetto: 'White Maman Cochet' (destined for a new front bed), 'Marchesa Bocella' (heading for a pot home), 'Mme Scipion Cochet' the Hybrid Perpetual (planned for a switch with a non-descript tea that does nothing for me and that's saying a lot because I love teas) and Martha Gonzalez who will be staying in a pot, I think. Quite unbelievably, all this juggling left one vacancy in the garden.

So, as circumstances often do, today they conspired to fill that vacancy. Just on a lark, I went up to the Rose Petals Nursery website where previously all roses were designated, "Item cannot be ordered." Imagine my glee upon seeing the words, "Available from stock." Well, right off the bat I knew there were two roses I really wanted (uh-huh, I can see you doing the math in your little heads), 'Lilian Austin' and 'Souv de St. Anne's'. I had seen them in November when visiting a friend's garden, and they stole my heart. Now, as to the math, Lilian will go in the vacancy, and SdSA will go in the spot of one of my three 'Hermosa' bushes who will go in a pot, a lovely one, I'm sure. Well, as long as I was there, I figured I'd look at the Polyanthas. After all, they're small. (And don't argue.) And this is where the conspiracy enters the picture. Someone put a climbing polyantha in with the bushes. So obviously this was meant to be. There before my eyes was 'Climbing Clotilde Soupert', proclaiming her availability. Someone knew that I'm a sucker for this rose since I have two bush forms, and she performs wonderfully for me. Someone also knew that Parade has been living here on borrowed time, saved by her flowers that I love but doomed by her, shall we say, foliage. Ah-ha, 'Clotilde Soupert' would be the perfect climber for the prime front porch location of 'Parade', and 'Parade' could go somewhere in the back, somewhere I'm not sure where, but later on that.

I'm counting and counting again. Dang, 97! It's a conspiracy, that's all. One thing's for sure though. I'll never have more than 100, because that's all the markers I have.