garden roses

I have been having lots of odd weather/climate change conversations recently, what with it being such a dry and early year (so you know, I am; yes, climate is changing - no, an early spring doesn't prove it).  Whatever the reason the roses are out well before they usually are and are going over quickly.  Get them while they last, they are looking great.

The roses here are a mix of odds and sods from yesteryear with a few new ones planted over the past few years.  The Phoenix is being managed as a natural garden and they are probably not first class shrubs for wildlife but in full bloom they bring a welcome touch of luxury and they are useful protectors for other plants - they are spikey and prevent in-bed-intruders.  None of the roses here get any other treatment than the occasional dollop of compost, regular deadheading of repeat flowerers and a prune and tie-in in winter.  No sprays, no extra food and no extra water.  A couple of them get hit each year with blackspot, the fungal bane of rose growers, but they seem none the worse for this.  Powdery mildew silvers leaves and twists new growth later in the season but it seems to do no lasting damage.  I find them tough and they grow and flower well in the rubble soil here.

'Iceberg' white, repeat flowers well, unscented. 

Unnamed (possibly 'Felicia'), soft pink, fantastic fragrance.

I lost the label of this, one of the David Austin English roses (all are over-rated I think), great when first out, fades badly.

50p bargain bin, good scent, very spiny flower stems, blighter to deadhead, blackspot prone. 

50p bargain bin, nasty shade of pink, blackspot prone.

 50p bargain bin, tall red blooms, no scent I can detect, repeats non-stop, lovely red foliage in early spring.

Climbing red rose, good first flush of bloom, gets too dry here (it's under the tulip tree) to flower again, very thorny.

 Zephirine Drouhine, pink, scented, thornless, mildew-prone.

'Pilgrim Climbing', I like it when the buds first open,

 less so when fully open (too many petals for my taste), and I can't detect the scent,

but the bush has thickened nicely up the railings at the North end.  Another English Rose. Not as yellow as I hoped it would be but disease free.

  'Ballerina' semi-double, soft pink, repeat flowers well, tough, tough, tough.

 Along the front railings this vigorous white rambler throws it's thorny stems like living barbed wire.  In full flower the fragrance battles the ammonia stink in this pee-soaked corner.  Mildew gets hold every year but it still manages to grow new 3m stems each year.

Tied in during winter it flowers only once in a great burst and garlands the rails with this glorious display.  I think it is 'Rambling Rector' - rather apt at the foot of the Churchyard steps.

'Francis E Lester' apple-blossom single flowers with a good fragrance, followed by ornamental pea-sized red hips.  Covered in aphids early in the season it shrugs these off undamaged and is my favourite medium sized rambler, growing to 5m.

And the very best is this three year old giant rambler, Rosa filipes 'Kiftsgate', with fragrant single cream flowers with yellow stamens.  This is growing to go up the walnut tree where it should eventually hang great trails of blossom from top to bottom.  That's the idea anyway, it is a monstrously big rose and I may regret it in the long term but for now I just love it!

For wildlife the garden roses are not the very best of shrubs but they are not the worse by far. The single roses will all be better as the open flowers are easy to access - only fat bumblebees can manage to muscle themselves into the centre of double blooms - the small red hips of Francis E Lester and Kiftsgate are eaten by birds through the winter months, the leaves of all are used by leafcutter bees to line their nests, rose sawfly grubs eat the leaves to skeletons, greenfly wait to be eaten while sucking rose sap and deep in the flowers camouflaged hunters, like crab spiders, lay in wait for the unwary. 

If you sniff at the roses, do mind your nose - you could end up like this hoverfly!

autumnal bloodletting and the demise of the fig

Since being murdered (by me) a few years ago the dead stems of the Virginia Creeper have hung over the churchyard wall in an increasing state of dishevelment.  I have all too easily managed to look the other way knowing blackbirds had nested twice in the mess of twigs and wrens aplenty were busy in there too.  Not to say that I'd been totally ignoring this area, I had been tying in the climbing stems of Rosa 'Mermaid' as if the dead creeper stems were some secure trellis but now, in a noisy flutter, the chickens have come home to roost so to speak and a strong gust brought the whole lot down like a giant, dirty, twiggy - and well armed - duvet.  More fool me.  

Mermaid is a great climbing rose, vigorously growing to 30ft and opening a long season of soft yellow single flowers throughout the summer.  This was planted three years ago and has grown rather well despite the competition of a greedy fig and droughty poor soil, though the affects of these have combined to cease the floral show prematurely each year.  It climbs using viciously hooked prickles and is as happy to hook onto a branch to scramble up a tree as it is to sink them to the hilt in my plump pink cheek - it means business but the stems are incredibly brittle and any rough treatment breaks of great lengths of stem.  Patience and a high pain threshold are needed to deal with this brittle-boned beast.   Extricating the mass of dead stems from it's clutches while keeping the bulk of the plant intact took a few concentration filled days, stop-start ladder acrobatics and up to date tetanus jabs.   

Wires have now been attached to the wall and with the rose stems tied into these it should now be able to get on with it's business well out of reach. 

Below the rose the fig had been losing an ongoing battle with me.  When I first came here the fig grew as a dense, all-concealing tree and was soon reduced to a stand of coppiced stems.  These had been tormented and tied-in over the past couple of years to form a low enfolding hedge around the green bench.  It fruited poorly as a tree and after pruning and training did no better, it had severely compromised the growth of surrounding and more desirable plants and with the green bench gone had lost it's latter-day purpose.    

Finally, after realising the burnt and blistered patches on my arms this summer were a reaction to its poisonous latex sap (this rather sealed it's fate) it was a pleasure to let Garard loose to wreak havoc on its roots.  Get it out!

Removed, roots and all, it is clear how it has shaded out the native berry hedge running past it and what a large space even the reduced fig had taken up - those big figgy leaves take a lot of light.  With the competition removed the shrubs should grow away strongly come spring.  In the meantime the hedge shrubs to the right of the fig have grown long vigorous stems ideal for filling in the gaps.

The long stems all along the hedge have been pulled down into place and tied in.  This both fills in the gaps until the weaker plants grow away but also help the hedge to thicken up to provide dense thorny cover for nesting birds and breeding insects.

In front of the hedge the lawn will be extended to run along the curve of the hedge - the wide bed as it is gets far too many footballs dropping into it and football retriever's must trample right in to get them.  A narrow wildflower strip should make this less of a problem.   

[Please note: if you are an angry, shouty, outraged fig person angered by it's removal and planning to come a-shouting my way be aware there is still a good fruiting fig growing at the back of the garden - note too if you get very shouty I may just run and chop that one down too]

releasing the inner pilgrim

At the Stacey St/Flitcroft St corner there has been an ongoing and unequal battle for supremacy between a Potato Vine - Solanum crispum 'Glasnevin' and a climbing English rose ' The Pilgrim' since planting three years ago. They were planted either side of a brick buttress to minimise the competition between their roots and both have established well despite how incredibly dry it becomes here every summer. The vigorous growth of the potato vine rapidly reached the top of the railings and covered with mauve and yellow potato flowers for months is beautiful but its dense growth had become far too dominant. The rose has been much slower to get going above ground and up until last year had only grown bush-like. It has flowered well but low on the railings all the flowers were picked by passersby. The advice for climbing English roses is to leave pruning well alone until it produces climbing shoots and I managed to keep the secateurs at bay. My patience was rewarded last year as finally a number of climbing stems, viciously thorned whippy growths, had grown up through the tangle of potato vine stems to wave wildly out the top.

The potato vine has done a great job of covering the railings but in the long term this space is the roses. All the dense top growth of the potato vine was cut away bit by bit to free the rose stems from its clutches - the thorn free stems of the potato efficiently snag on everything causing whippy vicious rose stems to slap my face to a chorus of my own cursing. The potato has now been reduced to just two stems and tied in to have its new growth trained out along the railings away from the rose - I'll see how it does this year but it may have to come out completely. The rose now freed had the longest shoots tied in along the top of the rails at the corner and its lower bushiness reduced. This forms the start of a permanent framework of flowering wood that with access to light and air, and up high and out of reach, should be covered this summer in a long lasting display of large soft yellow scented roses.