I was busy the entire day, weeding, mulching & planting strawberries, in shorts and a tank top, it was so warm! And it wasn't until the end of the day that I now remember to create our April thread!

April is National Garden month and we all love to have a

Today is International Children's Book Day:

(aka KORassenet, Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale, Eternal Flame, Gremlin, Joli Tambour, Gebruder Grimm)

Sue, glad you found time between weeding and what-not to start the thread
Zuzu, still on her time out? I noticed that now only your name appears as moderator for the Roses Forum.

Like you, I really like wearing shorts and tank top when I am in the garden! We actually had one day last week that was warm enough for shorts but instead of a tank top, I put on a short sleeve t-shirt - now I have a short-sleeve tan looks weird. Amazing how strong the sun is already.

Can you believe that the first quarter of 2017 is already over? April is a great month and aptly named 'National Garden Month'! Seedlings and small potted annuals and bi-annuals are on special all over the place - I really have to check myself when I go down to our local co-op I did buy a couple of trays of bedding begonias and petunias (nothing special) - but at CHF2.00 a tray I just had to

We are getting ready for summer - I high-pressure hosed the terrace yesterday and DH got all the garden furniture out of winter storage. Tonight we are going to have barbecue (SA English 'Braai') some nice steaks to officially open the season

I have neither 'Garden of Roses' nor 'Brothers Grimm' although they have been on my wish list several times over the past few years. Both are lovely, colour-wise, and both have been awarded ADR status but neither is especially fragrant. Now that I am running out of bed space I am trying to be a bit more selective and the number one criteria is selecting a rose from now on will be fragrance especially on bigger roses - miniatures well, that's another story

Yes, Zuzu is on permanent hiatus and enjoying her garden and evening reading & TV time!

Although I love the fragrant ones, my criteria is really wanting good looking plants too and so many of the Kordes roses are top notch in that department, especially Brothers Grimm and South Africa. The leaves always are so clean and beautiful. Of the 74 roses I own, only 10 are Kordes. I wish I had the room to add more.

Brothers Grimm gives me 3-4 strong flushes throughout the season, each one as full as the first spring one. It is a strong color though so can be tricky finding companion plants. I have two of them and one really should be moved but I'm afraid it's too big now. Actually, I'm afraid my bak wouldn't handle it!

I left one Kordes behind that I regret because I have not been able to find it since.

This was from my last garden, look at that dark green shiny foliage!


and at a local public rose garden

The weather did such pretty things to the blooms too.


Oh how I want an entire hedge of these!

Eureka looks like a great find!

It's an amazingly beautiful shrub. Always interested in how foliage complements flowers - not a topic that gets as much discussion as it might. Another one for the list...

@zuzu wishing you only the best for your well deserved 'permanent hiatus'. We have missed you and hope that you pop in from time to time to chat and share pictures of your beautiful roses

@Calif_Sue posting pictures like the ones above make a very good case for 'Brothers Grimm'.
Those pictures of 'Eureka' are spectacular and I would be sorely tempted if it was available here in Europe. I see that 'Eureka' is still on the Newflora website so you might consider contacting Chris Pellet to find out where you could acquire it.

Calif_Sue said: Although I love the fragrant ones, my criteria is really wanting good looking plants too.......

Goes without saying - a very fragrant rose that doesn't look good and requires constant pampering is not on the cards.

Steve, foliage is definitely one for the list!
My preference is for glossy or semi-glossy foliage rather than matt. I think it just makes the whole plant look healthier.

sunnyvalley said:
My preference is for glossy or semi-glossy foliage rather than matt. I think it just makes the whole plant look healthier.

I have often said, as have others, that the new foliage on Brothers Grimm is so deep green (with bronze) and shiny, it doesn't look real!

Is it true that glossy foliage resists black spot better than matte?

I wonder. And if so, is it the gloss itself and its ability to shed water, or does glossy foliage share a common heritage with a small cluster of blackspot resistant genes? I know I hold the prejudice that glossy leaves resist BS: I know I've never seen a good scientific analysis that would prove it.

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Rave alert...

Once one starts taking an interest in foliage, the plant takes on a completely new dimension, and one cannot think of the rose as just the flower anymore. I covet roses with bright-colored blossoms held against darkish new foliage. A new addition to the garden last year was Chris Evert: purplish new foliage & yellow flowers that blush, often together. Europeana's foliage stays deep bronze (here) for weeks, sometimes still showing color when its red roses open. Bronze foliage is a feature of Rainbow Sorbe and Mardi Gras, too. My guess is that it's a long list; but this new information about Brothers Grimm's bronze foliage bumps it up a number of notches on my 'to buy' list.

There are so many other interesting foliage colors. The brilliant new-grass-green of most rugosas is striking. (At least here in AZ where new-grass-green only exists in the wild for the two weeks when cottonwoods are making new foliage.) And I also love the bluish tinge to Queen of Denmark's foliage. Caramella FT is almost that shade. Sometimes the glossy olive green foliage on South Africa seems striking in its own right. Ditto Larissa, Julia Child, or Crocus Rose. And in the context of its flowers, the rather straighforward and otherwse unremarkable dark green of Nicole is a remarkably good framing device. Then there is the red fall foliage of Pink Pet.

I suppose most roses don't have much foliage interest; Dr. Huey for example.

Sometimes there's a minor clash. At least in principle, I'm not that fond of pale pink or pale lavender flowers on plants with bright green foliage that verges too close to chartreuse. Fortunately there are not too many examples of this: Jens Munk and Nouveau Monde have sometimes struck me this way, though.

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Hi, Sharlene and everyone else. Thanks so much, Sharlene, for the good wishes and gracious reminder. I will be posting photos and comments someday soon, but I'm still making up for lost time.

Before I retired, I always assumed that my home and garden would be in tiptop shape when I had all day and evening to work on them. Instead, I started spending more time on line. Years ago, a member of our Russian community who had only a tenuous grasp of the English language told us that her boss was in the hospital because his "nervous broke down." That was 50 years ago, but it's still the preferred description of any type of stress overload among the members of our community.

In February, when I realized that I had been retired for 4 years and was spending most of my waking hours on the database and other parts of the site while watching my home and garden projects piling up, my nervous broke down. I took what I assumed would be a short break from my mod and admin dutieis and was so pleased by the number of projects I was able to complete in just the first month that I decided to make the break permanent. I will be back soon to offer a progress report on the rose nurseries I used this year, but I'm waiting for the roses to bloom. I want to make sure there was no mislabeling.

Well see, not a complete hiatus! Yahoo for upcoming photos!

I sometimes have what I call a "trivial memory". In other words, little bits of data get stuck in my mind and I do understand the concept, but unless it's important to me at that time, I really don't study a topic deeply and just keep that little bit in my memory.

I had remembered that glossy leaved roses were more susceptible to many of the races of black spot, but that's all I remembered. I did a quick Google search and found this article:

http://hortsci.ashspublication...

This is the most important paragraph:

Rose cultivars can vary significantly in their susceptibility to diseases incited by fungal pathogens (Castledine et al., 1981; Palmer et al., 1966; Reddy et al., 1992; von Malek and Debner, 1998; Xue and Davidson, 1998). Interestingly, Genders (1965) reported that glossy leaved varieties of rose were more troubled by the blackspot pathogen Diplocarpon rosae than the less glossy leaved varieties. Because the degree of glossiness or glaucousness of a leaf surface is the result of the amount of crystalline structure in cuticular wax deposits (Jenks and Ashworth, 1999), Genders’ findings reveal that waxes of the rose cuticle may play an important role in rose pathogen resistance. Moreover, numerous studies in other plant systems show how diversity in the structure and composition of cuticular waxes can be associated with plant protection against fungal pathogens, sometimes in complex ways and often unique to the specific plant–pathogen interaction (Jenks and Ashworth, 1999). Recent studies also suggest that, besides waxes, the cutin component of the plant cuticle may also influence plant susceptibility to disease (Jenks et al., 1994; Xiao et al., 2004). To date, however, the exact function of either cutin or waxes in rose pathogen resistance is unclear. A detailed analysis of the cutin monomers and waxes of rose cuticle, along with an examination of disease resistance, in five important rose cultivars is reported here.

I really haven't searched any of my notes. I am pooped I finished pruning all of the roses. The deer fence is up. Tomorrow, I'll be weeding, composting, feeding and mulching. Starting Thursday, it is supposed to rain every day for a week.

Zuzu ... it's a delight to hear from you. I can understand how working on a database about something you love can become all consuming and the rest of your life just kind of is in a holding pattern.

It's good to know you are enjoying your garden. That just makes me smile.

Well, I committed an oops when I planted my roses recently. I thought Maggie was my climber because it had the stick in the pot like all climbers usually do. It kept bugging me though so I just checked and Rhode Island Red is my climber so I will be switching the locations of those 2 after the rains this week.

Lyn, congrats on finishing rose pruning & fencing.

I enjoyed the citation. I cannot say am surprised to learn that waxes play a role as barriers to pathogens in roses.

I do think there can be some danger in extrapolating from "five important rose cultivars" to 30,000 no matter how thorough the analysis of those five cultivars might be.

Zuzu, I am delighted to hear that your sage advice and good judgement will still be a part of this site. It would be truly monumental loss if it were otherwise.

Databases are bottomless pits that never can be adequately full of facts and information. And when they are, there is always an uncountably large number of ways to reorganize the information so that it's more useful to someone. If it's what one loves to do; one should do it. When other projects become more important it is not.

There is no way we can express our gratitude for all the work you have put in to make this a better site. That said, I do hope you really get a great deal of enjoyment out of your garden, and that you are able to share some of that with us...

For some reason, "Eureka" appears to have vanished from nurseries here.
I lost a very good specimen a few years ago ( a ladder smashed it to pieces...) and haven't been able to find a replacement for it.

Regarding foliage color, "Queen of Sweden" has a very sage green matte color to it...at least here it does. It's the only rose I have with that color foliage. It gets plagued by PM here.
"Chihuly" keeps it's red foliage here longer than any other rose I have. Very curious.

Lyn: Very interesting info. you posted about the disease resistance and cuticles, etc.
I never gave foliage color a second thought until now.

Zuzu! So good to hear you are enjoying your garden and also good to know you will still pop in on us from time to time!

Today is American Circus Day: