A Spring Quickie

Here’s a few quick shots of some roses that I have taken over the last week or so.

This one is Gertrude Jekyll which I have growing as a climber along the fence. It isn’t a prolific flowerer at other times of the year but it puts on a great show in spring.

It’s being a little swamped this year by Heritage, also grown as a climber next to it. That’s probably my fault since I tend to favour the Heritage over the Gertrude Jekyll when I’m pruning since GJ is so incredibly thorny. I will have to let it go a little more.

And finally a shot of Abraham Darby. This rose is taking a long time to grow for me but it is beautiful and superbly fragrant. I do what I can to encourage it – maybe it’s the spot, maybe it’s that particular plant.

Happy gardening!

GBB Day Number 1

Hello and welcome to my garden blog if you’re new here. Please feel free to have a look around. In Australia it’s winter and finally the weather has cooled down (like right down to nearly freezing in the morning) here in Perth. We still haven’t had much rain but we have two desalination plants and are now pumping recycled water back into the aquifers to boost supplies so we’re a little less reliant on rainfall nowadays. It doesn’t help the native forests though and we lose a few more trees every year to dry winters.

Anyway, enough of my rainfall anxiety and on to what I want to show you from my garden…

This time round I’ve got a few more photos of the last of the roses. First up there’s this, the most perfect ‘Moonbeam’ bloom ever! Being right next to the front gate it’s something I see on a daily basis, so I didn’t miss its single day of perfection.

The Lamarque put on a stunning display with a final flush of blooms. I absolutely adore this rose. The pole I have supporting the stem has been developing a lean over this last season and I have been slightly panicked that the whole thing’s going to topple and crash to the ground in the next storm so I have pruned it hard and I have a plan to build a support for it that will hopefully take the weight of the top.

And my final bloom for the day is this lovely Pat Austin.

I’m linking up with Garden Bloggers Bloom Day at May Dreams Gardens

Enjoy your gardening

The end of Autumn

Lamarque

Depending on how you count these things we are either at the start of winter now or coming to the end of autumn.

The Crimson Glory Vine has great autumn colours even in Perth

And it’s been a warm dry autumn here in Perth with the temperatures only now starting to drop, along with the leaves.

I can’t rave enough about the performance of Duchesse de Brabant

I got my camera out and have taken some photos of what’s in bloom around the garden.

A Darcey Bussel bud starts to open

With the warmth the roses are still blooming well

My Camellia in flower

William Shakespeare

Iceberg with a few hips

Young Lycidas, still only a young plant, is putting on a good display

Bold seduction

Sharifa Asma

My new rose, St Cecilia

The truly gorgeous Abraham Darby

Floribunda Bridal Pink in bud

And full flower

And that’s it – happy gardening!

Pierre de Ronsard (Eden rose) weeping standard

It’s rolled around into autumn and finally the end of the heat here in Perth and I still have one last post to go using photos I took last spring.

This is my Pierre de Ronsard (or Eden rose as it’s called in some parts) weeping standard.

I bought this from Roworths nursery in Landsdale. 

They have this cracker example in their carpark. This photo was taken around January or February I think, so blooms aren’t all that prolific, but the shape of it had me pulling my wallet out and asking ‘how much?’

Pierre de Ronsard is one of those rose varieties that take a few years to mature into a prolific bloomer. The maturity of it when I bought it meant that I only had to wait a couple of years for its flowering season to extend through to autumn. Up until then it didn’t flower past Australia Day (at the end of January).

This year it is starting to take on a good form as well.

In sadder news, however, the tally of deaths at the end of this summer is 5. I bought a couple of fuchsias (love them) last spring that didn’t make it; lost a couple of natives (a grevillea and a dwarf tea tree) possibly from old age - I hear some of them are short-lived; and my silver birch which is very sad.

One of the first trees I planted, after 8 summers it has passed away… now I’ve got to decide if I can do something with that lovely trunk or remove it and start from scratch.

Ahhh gardening. It has its ups and downs. Best wishes for yours.

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 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

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.