February is Heart Health Month, so the thumbnail photo for this month's chat thread is Heartbeat, one of my favorite floribundas.



The 1st of February is National Freedom Day. The Rose of the Day is Spirit of Freedom.

Great way to start the month Zuzu!!



Can you believe it - the first month of the year is over!!! To tell you the truth, I don't really mind because the weather was terrible. I don't mind the cold so much but not seeing the sun for so long was very depressing!
that February is better.

January certainly flew by, and I barely got anything done because of the rain and the cold. The recovery from the cataract surgery kept me inside for two weeks in December, and January has been soggy and muddy. I'm only about halfway through with my pruning, and I've had to escalate my pruning efforts to a minimum of 50 roses a day so I can get things done. I haven't pruned much for the last two years, and everything's hideously overgrown, so I'll be pruning almost all of my roses this year.

It's difficult because I have nowhere to put the cuttings. My green cans will be occupied for weeks by all of the branches from my Douglas Fir. The rain and wind keep ripping them off the tree and depositing them in the street, in my flower beds, on my roof, etc. The Black Walnut and Silk Mimosa are also losing branches, of course, but they're in back and don't create traffic hazards, so it will be a while before I get to them.

So the rest of this month will be a rush to clean up the garden while I'm dodging huge thorny piles of rose clippings.

I will be getting five bare-root roses from Witherspoon next week. It's my first order from Witherspoon, so I'll let you know how the roses look.

What to do with rose prunings is a problem for me too, somehow - even though I normally only cut off dead wood and have a whole farm to distributed them . (?!)

The last time I left piles of clippings near the flower beds, the bottom clippings took root and started to grow into rose bushes in the middle of the pathways.

You can always post them in Classifieds for shipping costs. There might be some people who will want them.

I don't think people want unnamed clippings, and I certainly don't want to spend my time packing them up and then carrying the packages a couple of miles to the post office. It's still too cold here to think of that as a nice walk.

At least my clippings don't grow.

It's Hedgehog Day. The Rose of the Day is Rosa rugosa, known as the Hedgehog Rose.



I once planted a whole hedge of rugosas about 20 years ago. Two years later, they suddenly were crawling with curculio weevils. I had never seen the weevils in my garden before, so I pulled out the entire hedge. Unfortunately, the weevils stayed and started spreading to other roses, starting with the purple Gallicas and Portlands and finally attacking any rose, with no regard for class or color. I sometimes feel sorry for my rugosas, which had to die for the weevils' sins.

Today is also Crepe Day, so I want to put in a good word for Crepuscule, a sweet noisette rose that grows well on its own roots.



The word "crepuscule" actually means twilight and has nothing to do with crêpe, the pancake or the fabric, but how likely am I to find another holiday to feature it?

zuzu said:The last time I left piles of clippings near the flower beds, the bottom clippings took root and started to grow into rose bushes in the middle of the pathways.

Just goes to show that growing roses from cutting is not that difficult, doesn't it?
Is all this fussing with callusing in the fridge, rooting hormone and special potting mixes really necessary? Maybe only if you are trying to root a very rare cutting.

So, if you want to try and root some of your roses just stick a couple of pencil thick clippings directly into the ground while you're pruning - no fussing. Keep them moist and keep pinching the new growth then come fall you should have a couple of new plants. I had about 70% success with mine last year - way to many and actually chucked some out.

Zuzu - how many roses do you have??? 1600 plus some!! Have to do some math here - that means if you do 50 a day you will be busy pruning roses every day for the next 32 days, longer if you don't garden on weekends
If I were you I would get someone in to help! Just remembering how my hand and wrist felt last year and I only have about 180!!

Crepuscule is such a beauty, wish it was a bit hardier but I think it would struggle here.

I'm finding several of my roses have swelling growth buds. It is too early, by about 6 weeks- this has me concerned. Maybe spring will come early this year. That can be nice, but I'm always worried a cold snap will set everything back after growth has begun.

Neal, that's what happened here last year! Bad frost late April! As a result I only really had two flushes last year. Everything shifted and in November lots of buds but then it was too late already.
for this year.

Crepuscule is struggling here for a very different reason. I made the big mistake of underestimating the vigor of Peggy Martin and planted the two roses too close together. The result is apparently a huge mass of Peggy Martin that sports scattered blooms of Crepuscule.

Oh those April cold spells are heartbreaking! About 12 years ago we had temps in the low 20sF for several nights in a row in late April. I tried covering some tender sprouts but it stayed too cold for too long for my coverings to help.

Porkpal, moving it doesn't sound like a very appealing option! If Crepuscule can compete, those peachy blooms mingled among the pink does sound pretty, especially having seen zuzu's photo above with the pink in the background.

Moving either rose would require that I fight my way in to find their sources - not likely to happen. The unruly tangle, however, is sort of appropriate for my rose growing style.

All the plants here seem to think it is spring, but the groundhog says we are not finished with winter, Can he be wrong?

Don't think your groundhog is wrong Porkpal! We have temps below freezing forecast for next week again!
I got word this morning that one of my orders was being shipped and as the ground is still frozen, I am potting them. I went and got a couple of bags of rose mix from our local co-op after work and just as well I got them early. They were frozen solid! I have them standing up in the garage now hoping that they will thaw by Saturday.

Sharlene, I have just under 1700 different cultivars, but I have more than one of many of my favorites, and I have many unidentified roses, so the total's over 2000. Some of the roses are never pruned -- the teas, chinas, and noisettes. Some of the modern roses are still too small and weak for much pruning, even after years and years in the ground. This is their last year, by the way. If they aren't at least a foot tall by summer, they're coming out. I'm getting too old to baby little hybrid teas and floribundas that produce just one or two blooms a year.

I was able to prune about half of the remaining ones in December and January. I think I have 700-800 to go. At 50 a day, that should take only two weeks or so, although it's raining again, so today's a wash.

I used to have painful wrists at pruning time, but then I discovered a delightfully ergonomic garden tool -- the Fiskars PowerGear Bypass Pruner. I can now snip and cut all day without ever feeling it in my wrist. Unfortunately, it's becoming difficult to find. The company put out an "improved" model -- the PowerGear 2 -- and it's vastly inferior to the older model. It's too big for my hand, it slips out of gear if the branch is too thick, it often sticks and won't open all the way, and it occasionally pinches the skin on my hand when it lets go of the branch.

zuzu said:The last time I left piles of clippings near the flower beds, the bottom clippings took root and started to grow into rose bushes in the middle of the pathways.

I just pile mine onto a tarp so I can haul them down the hill to the burn pile.

I used a tarp at the San Jose Heritage Rose Garden when I volunteered to prune before I moved up here. I had to haul the clippings out of the garden area to the back. I found it was easier to drag a tarp-full of clippings than to make many trips with a wheel barrow.

This is National Wedding Ring Day. The Rose of the Day is Three Weddings.