Merry Christmas!!!!

This is Lamarque

Have a look at the beautiful Old Garden rose, Lamarque.

This is a Noisette rose bred by Marechal in France in 1830. If you would like to delve further into the story of Noisette roses have a look at this article. Go on –it’s interesting.

Lamarque has white blooms with a pale lemon yellow centre and mine is moderately fragrant.

The flowers are produced from spring through to late autumn in heavy clusters, producing a spectacular display.

It’s a large climber that can apparently grow to 6 metres. Mine is a weeping standard which I bought from Roworths Rose Nursery (this is not a sponsored post by the way). Luckily for me it doesn’t mind a prune. I give it a light prune in early autumn and when the canes start attacking me as I walk past, along with a harder prune in winter.

You can see in the photo how it looks at the end of autumn and, below, how it looks at this time of year, post prune.

Last year I pruned it much harder, almost back to the support ring, and I wasn’t that thrilled with the result. It was still large by the end of autumn, but it took quite a while to get to an attractive size and shape and the spring blooms weren’t as prolific, probably because there was less plant for them to grow on.

Apparently this isn’t always the case with Noisettes. My Gardening Neighbour has several and he has pruned them with unfortunate results – a very slow recovery. Certainly my rose book recommends not pruning Madame Alfred Carriere, another of the Noisettes.

I decided to buy a weeping standard for this spot based on this photo in the coffee table book, Rural Australian Gardens. The book doesn’t say what rose appears in the photo but I later found an earlier photo of the same property in another rose book I borrowed from the library; apparently it is a rambler I had never heard of – Minnehaha.

So when I went along to the nursery I had this image in my mind, with either pink or white flowers. On site the choices were either Iceberg or Lamarque and the ever helpful staff recommended this one. It hasn’t let me down.

Thanks for reading. Happy Gardening!

Open Gardens in Adelaide part 2

Buckets of St Cecilia roses - $5 per bunch!

Well hello there!

I’m back with part 2 of my visit to gardens participating in the Open Gardens scheme.

This is the second of the two we visited, a property that the owners had lovingly transformed to provide vegetables, grapes and a great place to relax only a relatively short time earlier.

The workload must have been back-breaking because it had one of the steepest driveways known to man.

Unfortunately the light was a little glary and most of the photos of the rose bed that I took were too washed out, these are the best.

Finally to round it all off, here are some photos from my parent’s garden. Hope you like them!

Happy gardening!

Open Gardens in Adelaide part 1

I’ve just come back from a holiday in my home town of Adelaide in South Australia. While I was there we visited two gardens that were participating in the Open Gardens Scheme, a scheme where private gardens are opened to the public for one or two days on a weekend for a small charge and money raised goes to their favourite charity and to keep the scheme going (when I was doing research into this I discovered that Open Gardens Australia is calling it quits at the end of this spring–autumn season so get out there now while you can). The information that was on the website about these gardens has now been taken down so I can’t confidently tell you more than that they were both in the Adelaide hills area.

These photos were taken at the first place we visited– a small farm with a few grapevines and horses.

They had some sculpture on sale and these were dotted about the garden;

a topiary bed, including a holly bush;

hedges between the sheds;

weeping trees – a silver birch on the right and mulberry on the left;

and roses and flowers everywhere

Happy Gardening

Sue

Self-seeders

Today I’m going to talk about the self-seeding plants I have in my garden, and since it’s November the 11^th, Remembrance Day, I’m going to start with the poppies.

I have bought punnets of Flanders field poppies from time to time (usually available in the shops from late autumn) and I now get poppies coming up willy-nilly in the front yard. This year’s poppy has come up in my newly-created garden bed but often they will just pop up where they can. 

This one is from a couple of years ago. I love them!

The other punnet planted self-seeders are these coastal daisies or erigeron. The design of this bed was actually prompted by a sense of nostalgia, since I had the whole of my side garden area (not a huge area by the way) planted with it at my previous home, with narrow meandering paths weaving their way through it. I like the look – it’s always been my dream to have a meadow and this is the closest, lowest maintenance effect I could find. 

They are perennials and I have irises (in spring), trees, lavender and roses thrown in there as well. So it’s a sort of field I guess. The erigeron has a tendency to smother a lot of plants so it’s difficult to have variety on the same height level because it just gets taken over. I also prune it down in winter to keep the height down a bit. Anyway, what started as two or three punnets has quickly spread to cover the area.

When I first moved in here, faced with the prospect of designing and planting most of the yard, I went for some short-term solutions by throwing in some seeds. 

Most didn't come up or perhaps were eaten when they were too small to be noticeable. 

Nasturtiums did. And every winter they create a sea of green, and then flower in spring. Summers here are too hot for them and they have usually gone by Christmas. 

Hello Roses!

Here in Perth we’re in the middle of the first rose flush of spring, and this year we are having a good season.

Red Pierre looking truly spectacular

So often it can be spoiled by wet or too cool weather, but not this year.

David Austin’s ‘Munstead Wood’

This year the warm weather at the end of winter has meant that most of the roses are looking well foliaged for a change.

Named for the ballerina, David Austin’s ‘Darcey Bussell’

Hybrid tea, ‘Bonfire’. The petals turn red in the sunshine as it ages

This is hybrid tea, ‘Granada’

You might remember, back in autumn, I was talking about moving my ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ rose. Well here it is in its new home and flowering much better already.

This one is hybrid tea, ‘Radox Bouquet’

The thorny, but beautiful ‘Gertrude Jekyll’

And finally, another Austin rose, Scepter’d Isle.