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Old Garden Roses: The Gallicas
Continuing my Youtube series on the old garden roses, this on covers the Gallicas. This class of roses was so dominant in Europe in the middle ages, there were literally hundreds of cultivars. Treasured for its close-to-red color, breeding focused on high petal counts, deep shades of pink and purple, and novelty traits like stripes and mottling.
I also mention in the video that the Gallica roses are of a low, suckering habit. Some, like R. gallica officinalis can form a bit of a thicket in the garden if left to wander. A few gardeners have come to me in distress when their gallica “takes over” a perennial bed. I’m sympathetic, of course, but I assure you the rose didn’t dominate that landscape in a single year – if attended to, the suckering can be managed (or wisely relocated to a more appropriate location).
This video runs a bit longer then the others, just because there’s a lot of material to cover. Next up: the Albas.
When my Bare Root Roses Arrive in Fall
It is truly one of my favorite things to add roses to my collection. If this were a big commercial nursery, it would be a different story. I’d want to focus on a few of the best sellers – propagate them in large, uniform crops – sell out early in the season, and spend the rest of the summer kayaking! Instead, I bog myself down with the slow process of establishing hundreds of “mother” plants – learning their individual eccentricities, and then bringing them to market a few at a time, because seriously, there’s a limited demand for specialty roses.
But I love it. This is not a business with a rose inventory attached, but rather a rose collection with a little backyard nursery to grow along with it.
So, in the video below, I take delivery of my fall order of bare root roses – 5 more that I’ve never grown before: Variegata di Bologna, Sempervirens spectabilis, Jacques Cartier, Alba suaveolens, and Kazanlik.
It caps off a year where I’ve added probably a dozen others, some from local nursery finds (‘Konigen von Danemark’ comes to mind), some ordered in spring from another bare root supplier… but my favorites of all came to me from other gardeners: ‘Souv. de la Malmaison’, ‘Narrow Water’ (thanks Elaine), ‘Etoile de Hollande’ (thanks Bob!) and ‘Maigold’ (thanks Sanjoy).
All this means that in the next few weeks, I’ll be updating my list on Helpmefind
I’ll also be posting here with a current inventory of winter carryover, ready to be claimed for spring sale (or sooner, if you’re a real die hard!).
Portable Sprinkler Project
See what I do when I have a little time on my hands? I start cementing PVC into funny shapes to move water around!
Here’s the video:
I’ll completely understand if you conclude this to be an eccentricity related to off-season idleness (actually, pretty busy winterizing roses right now, but whatever). The need for this kind of a portable stand actually arose with my employer, where we grow acres of perennials, and sometimes I just need to have one crop watered rather than scheduling a whole bed or house. Before we fashioned these portable sprinklers – which I think are rather stylish, by the way, like an Ikea chair or something – we had to lug around some rather heavy stands.
Why heavy? Well, it comes down to the water pressure coming from the impact sprinkler head. Once you install the sprinkler head onto a riser (at say 36″ high, for consistent coverage and tall crops) the pressure of the spray makes the riser sway back, and can even topple a riser with too little support. This all PVC design is great because it has a wide base, and the pipes fill with water for stability. When the job is done, unhook the hose, and when the water drains, the sprinkler is quite light and manageable.
We still have some of the old, hideous contraptions hanging around the nursery – but they never get used!
Now, I may have to do something about the color. Any suggestions?
Build a Rose Arbor with Bent Metal Tube
I would need a fast-forward button to improve my skills at garden design. I could hold the button, and the years would zoom by to show me the eventual size and scale of the trees, shrubs and perennials I’m planting. Somehow, my imagination isn’t adequate to the job. One example of this is in the cedar arbors we installed on either end of our rose garden:
Above pictured are the quite lovely roses ‘Amadis’ (a thornless pink climber) and ‘City of York’ (a thorny beast on the other side of the archway). I guess I knew that they could exceed the height of the arbor when I planted them, but without that fast forward button, I don’t think I grasped quite how out of scale the little wooden structure would look. Quite aside from the looks of it, there then came the stability problems. We tried to shore up the arbors with heavy landscape posts dug in beside them, but under the weight of the plant growth and the ongoing assault of the winds, the structure is struggling to keep standing.
So, my wish-list for replacing them:
- larger – enough to drive our ride-on lawnmower through, and tall enough to support a 12′ climbing rose
- stronger – dug into the ground deep enough to support itself against strong South (summer) and East (winter) winds
- long-lasting – if I use wood, our wet climate will put it at jeopardy of rot. I don’t want to rebuild them any time soon!
- affordable
A bit of online shopping left me no further ahead. There are plenty of metal or vinyl arbors, but they aren’t much different in size to what I have already. They would also face the same issues of anchoring them into position against our persistent winds. To buy a pair of anything nearly suitable was at the very top end of our budget – without exactly meeting our needs.
Our eventual solution was to build our own, and this video documents our efforts:
The supply list in detail:
13 x black top fence rail (10ft by 1 3/8″) approx. $26 ea. = $338
4 x galvanized top fence rail (10ft by 1 3/8″) approx. $20 ea.= $80
1x 1 liter can of black gloss paint for metal = $20
20x 2″by 5/8″ carriage bolt, nuts, & washers = $15
8x bags of quick concrete mix approx $8 each = $64
2x new drill bits = $20
Total budget: approx. $537 for both arbors
Here is the front one finished (with the old one flat down in the background):
And here’s the back one:
The total height of each arch (above ground) is around 10.5 ft. Additionally, there’s about 3.5 ft of the support posts sunk into the holes and held down with concrete.
Most everything went smoothly, and I’m pleased with the results. They actually look a little larger than I anticipated, but this time I think they’ll be in proper scale with the climbing roses, so it’s just going to take a little time until they’re grown over and blend better with the landscape.
The only difficulty I really had was with the drilling (which took a lot longer than I thought it would) and I also had to accept that there would be imperfections along the way – everything is built, cut, bent, drilled and painted by hand. There are flaws that (I hope) are only visible to me, and will, in any case, be pretty hard to spot once the roses grow over.
One last note that I would make is that the large size of my arbors really did determine the budget. If you scaled down the cross bars to 3 1/3 ft (down from 5), and reduced the height / buried portion, you could easily get the budget down below $200 per arbor.
As for the time involved, it took me about 2 weeks from start to finish – not full-time, of course, but evening hours and weekend days. The most time consuming part was the drilling (2 to 3 evenings) and painting of the arches (2 evenings). The project happily wrapped up on Christmas eve, just in time to clean my work area before having holiday guests over!
Winter Garden Plants
For the front garden, we decided on a fairly tight theme: plants chosen for their fall and winter features. You might think that this plan would feel restrictive or limiting, but I actually found it to inspire my creativity. I started by ordering a few varieties of willow, with their colorful winter stems. That led on to other plants with interesting stems and bark, and then on to plants with colorful berries, blooms or foliage through the cold season. In this post, I’ll list some of the best small trees, shrubs, and perennials for winter color.
Here’s a video tour of the garden as it stands going into winter of 2017:
Stems and Bark
Both dogwoods and willows display brightly colored stems after their foliage drops in the fall, and that color often intensifies over the following months. We selected 5 varieties of willow and 3 dogwoods for the front garden. They all put on their best color on first-year growth, so I recommend a low annual spring pruning.
- Salix x. ‘Flame’
- Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’
- Salix rubens ‘Hutchinson’s Yellow’
- Cornus ‘Winter Flame’
- Salix alba ‘Chermesina’
- Cornus sericea
- Salix matsudana tortuosa – red corkscrew willow
- Salix alba ‘Britzensis’
To round out the bark colors and textures, I also added:
- Acer griseum – paperbark maple, for its ornamental peeling trunk
- Rubus thibetanus – ghost bramble, for its striking white canes
- Lagerstroemia indica – for its patchwork of stem colors
Flowers for the Winter Garden
At first consideration, I would have been pressed to think of many plants that carry flowers through the cold of winter. We started with the late winter blooming Witch Hazel ‘Jelena’, but then expanded my definition to include shrubs and perennials that flower late into the fall or push the boundaries of early spring. Pictured is Mahonia intermedia, and our other selections are listed below:
- Mahonia intermedia
- Helleborus hybrids
- Hypericum – St. John’s Wort
- Schizostylis coccinea
- Hamamelis ‘Jelena’
- Ribes sanguineum – flowering current, for very early spring
- Viburnum ‘Dawn’
- Sarcococca confusa – Himalayan Sweet Box
- Bergenia cordifolia
Berries
I’m going to have to include roses in this category, because their main winter feature is their fruit. I chose these three for the winter garden:
- Rosa davidii – which also has deep red colored stems
- ‘Ballerina’ – a hybrid musk with a veritable cloud of small hips
- ‘Magic’ – a not-so-miniature mini rose with great fruit
Some of the most exciting color for the fall and winter garden comes from brightly shaded berries like these:
- Callicarpa americana
- Ilex aquipernyi ‘San Jose’
- Hypericum – for the fruit as well as flowers
- Callicarpa bodinieri
Foliage and Form
I still have some space in the winter garden, and my plan is to spend it on some of those evergreens and structural elements that tie a garden together when most of the other foliage has dropped. So far, I’ve planted:
- Cephalotaxus fortuneii
- Buxus ‘Winter Gem’
- Abies koreana
- Thuja occidentalis ‘Teddy’
The holly (Ilex) and himalayan sweet box (Sarcococca) listed above are also evergreen, and could be listed in this category as well. In addition to these conifers and broadleaf evergreens, I’m pondering the addition of ornamental grasses, which can hold their structure well in the winter. Even a deciduous shrub like Euonymus alata (burning bush) can add an architectural quality due to the cool way it accumulates snow atop its winged branches.
I’ll run out of space before I run out of plants
My one conclusion from designing this garden is this: once you start looking, there are plenty of plants with interesting winter features. There’s definitely some call for winter-blooming bulbs, ultra-early perennials, and the list of conifers with striking foliage is massive. I’ve made good progress in deciduous plants with colorful stems, but even within the willow family, there are another 3 or 4 I’d like to wedge into the beds somewhere. I’ll be making videos as the garden matures and fills in. If you’re interested, you can subscribe to my Youtube channel to get the updates. If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear those as well.