Roses of end of July

The garden has been gifting me with a sudden outburst of roses again.  I have been mending the soil, fertilizing, pruning, spraying them with Neem Oil and making sure they get a proper amount of water, and I’m sure I’m seeing an improvement… at least on the Chicago Peace and the floribundas Unicorn roses in the epicenter of the garden.

After I freed her up of surrounding perennials that were suffocating her, the Gemini rose is finally putting on buds that have started to open in a lovely blend of pinks with darker edges, and the French lace and Paradise rose (the one I stole from the little white cottage) have been also improving.  I can’t stop admiring them and begging for a stronger profusion. 

I can read my list of roses; that one I kept since we originally bought this house back in 2005 over and over again, and never get tired... never cease to admire my vision back them…. What a collection I had!

The majority of those roses are now gone, and most of the ones left are only giving a meager number of flowers.  I don’t know what else I can do to change or improve this; if it isn’t to start from the beginning again… but for now, I am happy with what I have, and with what the garden has to offer me…

 Including the Butterfly bushes!

On the other side of the garden towards the entrance path, the Love roses are doing splendidly. This Love grandiflora rose bush was a Mother’s Day gift to me from the Fisherman in 2008.  It is a beautiful red blend with a white reverse and a strong fragrance. 

How fortunate I feel to have been able to reclaim this old garden back and call it ‘mine’ again.  How splendid and wonderful this world of roses is to me!

I love how the window to our master room looks from the outside with the fairy lights inside shining through lace at dusk...

...and at any light of day!

...it looks cute from inside too!

I hope you are having a beautiful summer... enjoy every minute of it, because sooner than soon it will be gone. The world will be covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon and before you know it, autumn will be here!

The summer garden

July 19—not even 9:30am yet and I’m already crashing—literally. As much as I love working outside, I could had never been a cherry picker, or a grape picker, or a field worker.  I’m a total failure working under the scorching sun of summer.  My strength is weak, and fleeting… and thus, pruning the garden this morning had once again proven and confirmed all of the above.  

Ah, the perennials!  Fleeting as they can be, they are such an unruly bunch.  Right after they finished blooming they must be pruned down to the ground if you want to keep the aesthetic of the garden flowing.  The Shasta daisy were already tumbling down; leggy and unaccommodating as they are, and the Virginia creeper on the west side of the garden was growing without control, and so was with the herb garden; needing a good tidying up. This is the second time this year that I’ve pruned the viburnum snowball bush, and the effort was exhausting and arduous. 

Once long ago, behind that wall-tall Shasta daisy road, on the west side of the garden, a dwarf Burning bush used to grow there.  It dried out, and it needed be removed from the ground up roots and all—and what an ordeal that had been!  But it’s all done now.  The support where one of the Virginia creeper vine stands needs to be repaired soon, and the black-eyed Susan bushes hiding behind the Shasta daisy will need to be moved to another location.  But under this heat, I can only do so much, even in the early morning hours. 

On the other side of the garden, all those daylilies growing too bushy and too desiccated were removed for good today too.  The mysterious tall type of a perennial that’s been growing since the beginning of spring, but haven’t put a single flower yet was removed as well.  I may later regret having done this, but whatever these were, they were taking too long to put flowers, taking too much space in the garden for nothing, and it just had to be removed.  In the old good days of this garden, I would had never done that. Every plant and leaf here were a sacred thing to me, but now I don't want to waste time doing that. Life is too short, days too fleeting, summer too short.  I dislike something and out they go.   

The other day I went to see my little pond and was utterly surprised to discovered that a new garden creature had moved in!  His name is Maurizio (he’s Italian), and he has made my little pond, his pond.  As you can imagine, I’m thrilled!  Happy as can be, tacky as I can be, happy being just my little tacky silly self… 

I always say: 'Share your happiness with the world, give other people that happiness and let it come back,' so I’m hoping that, even if he’s not real, seeing him in my little pond will make you happy too!

Hence, I will continue accumulating garden friends until the Fisherman throw them out or throw me out, because he doesn’t really like seeming them ‘round here, you know!  "Is tasteless", he would say.  But I’m tasteless, tacky, and cheap in many ways; particularly when it comes to my garden!  Oh well what can I say, that’s who I am… and when I am myself, that’s when I am the happiest.  And that always have good results! 

You’re my favorite garden friends!  There’s always this piece of my heart that smiles when I see you here.  So remember this... someone remembers, someone cares; your name is whispered in someone’s prayers!

Love and hugs!

July miseries

July is a cruel month.  Have I mentioned that already?  Lush green grasses have withered and become ashen, and in some places a few strands of dead, yellow grass are showing up… some of my potted hostas have been badly scorched, and every houseplant had to be brought inside again—some of their beautiful leaves charred and stressed, and the perennials are looking droopy and exhausted from the blazing sun of July…

This is high desert climate, and whatever patch of grass we want to keep green it must be property and faithfully watered each and every day… I am thankful for our sprinkler system and precious water.

In fact, it’s been so hot around here that I have started envisioning those cooler, cozier autumnal days when the sun shines kinder on my windows in softer golden globules of light, and such was the spirit the other day, that I was prompted to change things around the house—put away the summer bouquets and bring in the calmer greenery of pines and fairy lights of cooler days.  

 

When winter comes around again, and my little world will be cold and white and windows frosted in glittery ice, then I will miss my roses again, and will be wanting to see my house beautified again with summer bouquets of yesterday’s peonies and roses…  

Roses—freshly cut, dried, fake, silk—they will always bring a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.

 

And when it is summer I will be dreaming of winter and when it is winter I will be dreaming of summer... because that’s just the way I am… always changing, always a contradiction within my soul…

The grapevine in the farther corner of the garden has been growing madly.  I decided to let it do what it dictates, but always under my watchful eye and care.  I’m doing this mostly to attract those beautiful Northern Flickers to my garden again this fall… these birds love to feed from very ripe grapes and when my little world turns orange and light acquires that certain ginger tint of the cooler days again, they will be coming by to feed from them.  So, this vine, is just for them, although I’m afraid I’ve started letting it grow a little late in the year and, perhaps, I won’t be seeing any ripe grapes this fall after all? 

The other two vines (which are the only ones I let be this spring); however, are fat with grapes, which will be used for all my green juices this fall.

I always like to read what I was doing a year ago this time, so I went to the little white cottage, and meandered through the pages of time to find me there….  This is what I was doing:

“This afternoon I went outside and collected bunches of hydrangeas to make bouquets... It was hot, but under the canopies of trees that protrude from the woods it felt comfortable and tepid and I found myself mystified by the sounds of summer, and the dark emerald shades of the woods, quiet and timing with life as they are.  This is what I love about summer, the strength and vigor of it.  The being wild and slow, old and yet growing young buds of dreams. For me, it is a magic that must be written in the old pages of my soul. We are all wanderers on this earth, and my heart is full of wonder, and my soul deep with dreams...”

I told you so... I’m an enigma wrapped in a contradiction.  Loving summer, hating July and wishing for June in December.  But always always loving the solitude and grandeur of Nature in whatever season...

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

― Mary Oliver

Wild roses...

Almost all of my old roses have gone ‘wild’, that is died back below the graft while we were away from our house and our roses… and perhaps this house should not be called by its original name any longer? Unless I start thinking of replacing all those wild roses, it should be called something else.  Something like “Robin Nest Cottage”, or “Mourning Dove Alcove”. 

I discovered this most heartrending of things at the beginning of spring, right after we moved back to our house in the roses, when they started putting forth some meagre blooms of single-petal red roses that hadn’t been there before.  This is pretty maddening and discouraging because you can still see growth from the root stock of these rose bushes, they are hardy and vigorous plants, they look every bit like a rose; thorns and all, but they don't show signs of a bud. You wait and wait looking forward to those beautiful buds only to be tricked into a great disappointment. After those few blooms at the beginning of spring, that’s it. 

I have learned that eighty percent of the roses grown in the US come from the Wasco, CA area and are grafted onto red climbing Rosa 'Dr. Huey'. So, if suddenly, all of your roses are red and throwing longer than normal canes, with no bloom whatsoever, pretty good bet your top graft is gone. 'Dr. Huey' is a pretty good rose in its own right, however, if you want a succession of blooms, they are not the best of choices and otherwise not garden worthy roses.

The worst thing is, I can cut all the wild stems back to the ground, and Dr. Huey doesn’t care.  I have tried in vain many times to dislodge the canes, but cutting suckers just makes them come back stronger. They must be carefully torn away, something that it is almost impossible in many cases, and they grow so fast that must be pruned almost every week.  Oh Dr. Huey why did you moved in? You should have gone to live with our renters, wherever they went!