June Roses

This has been an unusual spring, with plenty of moisture releasing us from a couple of years of drought. Having water in the lakes is a relief, but with off-on rain, plants don’t dry off fast enough to keep molds and fungal disease in check, and the bugs are going wild. Both Pam/Digging and MSS from Zanthan Gardens have experienced some problems with their roses and that's happened to our sprawling old dark red roses on the south fence.

But for the other roses? On their behalf I’m tempted to riff on Field of Dreams – “Is this Heaven”… “It's Austin…”... "Austin? I could have sworn this was heaven..."

Since the literature promised that Julia Child could rebloom, I was happy but not too surprised to see her developing a new set of butter-yellow flowers. There are about 10 buds on this 2-foot tall shrub rose which was just planted in March.

This 'Champagne' mini-rose arrived in a gift box in December. It was very unhappy inside the house so I hurriedly stuffed into a holding bed, hoping it would be alive when we returned from Christmas in Illinois. It froze but survived and was moved to the new side border in March. The little shrub has rebounded and is covered in buds - it's margarita weather, but we're also enjoying ‘Champagne’!

It was totally unexpected to see these buds when they began to develop on the tall pink rose on the trellis where walk meets gate.

Yes, that's the rose I described in April as 'once-blooming' pink rose. Each spring for 3 years it made long wands with roses at the tips. After the flowers faded, I pruned it back, gradually shaping it, trying to make the rose build a sturdy scaffold of branches, fed and watered it. Each May it shot out long wandlike branches, growing to 12-feet tall but there were no flowers until spring came again.

This year the spring show was fine- two dozen clear pink, nice-sized roses… and as they faded I once again cut the canes back & gave it a foliar feed. On June 1st we had an unprecedented rebloom.

As a gardener I can't just think "Wow, how nice that old pink rose rebloomed this year"... no, not me! I'm compelled to try to understand why it happened! Is it totally weather related? Instead of getting water from the garden hose, Mother Nature watered the rose this May, while the temperatures stayed under 90º F. Was that enough of a reason?

We've changed things in that bed - removing a 6-foot tall nandina from the center of the bed late last fall. Could it have cast enough shade on the rose to make this difference?

Until March the path next to the bed where the rose is planted was made from a wooden board, a hump of grass, and some inset stepping stones; Philo pulled out the wood and we got out the grass, made the bed wider, flattened the hump, and Philo made a proper walk. This could very well have had some effect.

When we moved here at the end of summer in 2004, this unnamed rose extended a couple of long canes over the shoulder-high nandinas and crepe myrtles that grew in front of it, and I fancifully imagined it asking me to free it, to feed it, to rescue it. Is it a once-blooming climber having an odd year? Is it a rebloomer that's taken three years to recover? What's the name of this rose? I don't know any of the answers yet, and will keep on wondering but in the meantime I'm enjoying the second flush of 20 roses.

Petals and Parody

Spring has been eluding so many of you, but it's already arrived in my Austin garden. White Mockorange and purple Iris filled the last post – here’s another purple flower for April Garden Bloggers Bloom Day –

In March 2001, a Clematis labeled “Comtesse de Bouchaud” came with two vines in one container. Both vines lived - one is the white clematis at the base of the Lady Banks Rose. The other one is this reddish-purple clematis near the back door. Neither of them look one bit like the lilac-pink “Comtesse de Bouchaud”! Now on to some coral colors -

In spring 2006 I planted my motley collection of Christmas amaryllis in the ground. Some lived, and three amaryllis flowers are opening in this partially shaded raised bed. A previous owner planted the unnamed, day-glow rose.

Two tall, once-blooming roses were already here, too. The roses are pretty, but the foliage is usually a mess. I occasionally feed and water them, pull off the worst leaves a couple of times a year and otherwise ignore them.

Another legacy! This big pink climbing rose also blooms once a year, with huge fragrant flowers that lean down to make me notice them whenever I go out the gate. They have an old-fashioned, real rose smell.

This spring a few of the dropped seeds from last year's plant of Nemophila menziesii AKA Baby Blue Eyes sprouted, and four of them bloomed. The flowers are small, barely visible from 3-feet away. Maybe one day I’ll have them established like the colony growing at Zanthan Gardens, or in the wooded areas of Zilker Park.


Mazus reptans, a low, spring-blooming groundcover plant, grows next to the Baby Blue Eyes.

Another reseeder is Salvia ‘Coral Nymph’, which hitched a ride from the last house, and has established itself in several beds. My Cape Cod weeder makes swift work of unwanted seedlings, but I leave a lot of them in place.

More coral from Stachys coccinea, Texas Betony – nicknamed ‘Stinky Sage’ by some Hill Country residents. It looks nothing like its fuzzy gray Stachys cousin Lambs Ears.

I didn’t take any photos of plants like the pansies, violas and various containers of ‘Telstar’ dianthus, since they’ve been blooming most of the winter. Summer heat will kill the pansies, and the dianthus will stop blooming and rest before starting another bloom cycle.

Posting this photo may not be too different from buying a bakery cake, sliding it onto a pan and passing it off as homemade. I just planted this golden yellow rose on Thursday! It's reputed to be heat resistant, disease resistant, scented, and was personally chosen by Julia Child herself before she died, perhaps because the flower color is close to her beloved butter.

Yellow roses have always been our special flower. When I graduated from high school, Philo gave me a dozen yellow roses. They appeared at our wedding, at anniversaries and the David Austin rose ‘Graham Thomas’ flourished in our Illinois garden. I hope ‘Julia Child’ will thrive to become 'our' yellow rose at this house.

And for the last flower - here is the tiny blossom that most of you yearn to see, wanting them even more than roses!

That concludes the PETALS portion of this post – now on to the PARODY.
As station KAEFKA, we're working on an original song for our YouTube collection right now, [the ones we've already made are in the side links] but we paused to have some fun with an old tune. Nick played the ancient folk song “Greensleeves” on resonator, I wrote some new words, and Philo added photos.
Have any of you seen articles and shows about the 'new green'? I respect people who aspire to green living - many of them have been plugging along for decades. Their valid concepts were ridiculed & ignored at first, before becoming mainstream with time. But lately, green living seems to have been co-opted by the wealthy and the fashionistas. The home-fashion press is splashed with pages of green renovations for mansions rather than normal homes. When I read that the cost of redoing a 1000 square-foot attic rec room to make it 'green', was three times the price of my house, I could weep or gnash my teeth, or I could make it into a musical joke.

You can use this link to our YouTube site - GREENED HOUSE VIDEO .

Or, if the YouTube screen shows up below you can click on the screen.

GREENED HOUSE