Looks like that driveway project is going to get a number of new roses. Julia Child and Out of Rosenheim will be near the street end. The climbers will be tucked back away from the drive along a stream. Not sure where I'll squeeze in the several new HTs, but there must be a place for them somewhere. Here's my list.
- Buxom Beauty (to replace 2 MAAB)
- Monica (thanks to RVR's high praise for it)
- Signature (does it really have that perfect form?)
- Lorice Wojciechowski (sometimes a name will sell a rose ... sometimes the rose has to stand on its physical qualities)
- Paula Smart (a smart buy, if I say so myself)
- Fairhope (have always fallen for its perfectly shaped little blossoms and its soft color)
- Julia Child (five for the driveway project)
- Out of Rosenheim (thanks to Cindi, hoping it looks good with Julia Child)
- Larissa (there just has to be room for a few foliferous. fragrant, and remontant climbers... there just has to be)
- Laguna "
- Jasmina "
- Albertine (to clamber up a large hill of boulders by the drive)
- Grandessa (can't resist a fragrant red climber)
- Roberta Bondar (King's Ransom x Buff Beauty .. a cross that seems to have inherited many of the best features of each)
- Kordes Brilliant (thanks to Toni)
- Lion's Fairy Tale (I had to choose one)


Cindi, Madame Plantier is in the ARE catalogue, I believe. I got two of them last year and they are growing vigorously.

Toni, I hope your strategy works. Somehow playing in the mud seems much more appealing to me here in March than it does in November. But I'll be interested to know how it works. Good luck with Charles de Gaulle. Saw a bunch of blooms on mine today before I saw you were getting it and I was reminded of your love of 'blue' roses. I do hope you like it.

Zuzu, I planted Jam and Jerusalem from Pickering this spring. It's been hiding underneath some nearby crocosmia foliage which I have to lift to view the flowers. I'm hoping the Palatine plants prove bigger and more vigorous for you. I was surprised to find the spring flowers devoid of pigment, showing almost snow white, but the autumn blooms have a nice blush-orange flush to them. I keep getting close to ordering Magenta, then I back away at the last minute wondering where it would fit in the garden. It looks like it could be a great rose. Maybe next year.

Steve, Larissa is not a climber. It's a very short rose, more of a ground cover than a climber. Jasmina, however, is a veritable giant and always looks good. I don't have Laguna, so I can't tell you anything about its qualities, but it is a climber.

I bought Lorise from Pickering a year or two ago and I just love it. HMF says it grows to 4 feet, but mine's about a foot taller than that. The coloring is unique: silvery-white blooms with a pale pink edge that gradually turns coral-orange.

Yes, Signature does produce perfect blooms.

Kordes' Brillant is an eye-popping sight in the landscape -- the brightest orange-red rose I've ever grown. When you're ready to post photos of it in the database, please note that Palatine is misspelling (or actually translating) the name. It's Kordes' Brillant (German for Brilliant), with an apostrophe after Kordes.

Thanks, Zuzu. I should have known that Larissa has a different habit since it's not listed with the climbers. I'm delighted to hear about experience with Lorise; I was going for the unusual effect.

Steve812 said:
Toni, I hope your strategy works. Somehow playing in the mud seems much more appealing to me here in March than it does in November. But I'll be interested to know how it works. Good luck with Charles de Gaulle. Saw a bunch of blooms on mine today before I saw you were getting it and I was reminded of your love of 'blue' roses. I do hope you like it.

*sigh* that's what I'm hoping for. To be honest, my favorite blue rose as far as true blue color has got to be Blue Bayou. That rose doesn't really show much of the pink overtones that many "mauve/lavender/blue" roses show.. they look almost 100% true blue (a soft pastel blue, but blue nevertheless). But as far as planting the roses in November rather than March.. I did this back in '10 when I got 2 roses from England. They were shipping out late October & I received them mid November. So I planted them very deeply & covered them 100% with mulch. Those two roses are some of the most vigorous roses I have.. and they were "bodybag" roses! The 2 roses I did this with RU (planted late, covered w/mulch until they literally were peaking out of the bucket w/growth) survived & bloomed nicely this year as well. So I'm going to try it. I'm not too worried about bugs eating the canes, but I *do* have to worry about extreme weather snaps killing off the tender new growth. I swear that's what killed off almost 100% of the roses from Cliff I had gotten.. they started to grow, then we got a freak cold front or something. I've lost too many from Cliff. And I had a 100% survival rate from the dead of winter until the beginning of spring!! But this summer was murder on the new growth..

My order will be shipped here November 19. I'm trying hard not to add any more, since I don't have a clear plan on where to plant the ones I already have on order. The roses I received this spring from both Palatine and Edmunds struggled in the heat this year, and didn't grow like I expected. The palatine roses out performed the Edmunds roses, though. The roses from my Austin order did the best of all, and what is surprising there is, they are planted out so far that they rarely got any water, and all of them are in full sun.
I've never had great luck planting in the fall, but if summers continue to be so extreme, then fall planting may be the best way to go. Other than mulching, what do you suggest?
I did plant some bare root, totally dormant roses last November, but we had an extremely mild winter, and fortunately, they stayed dormant until spring, when they started growth at the same time as the older roses.
Will the roses I get from Palatine this November be dormant? We (usually) have long mild fall weather, and the soil doesn't freeze until January, and sometimes not at all.
Except for those occasional winters when we get -17 degrees .....it's so hard to know what to do!

Cindi - That's what I'm doing.. having them ship me my roses in November too. I only received one "rose" from Edmunds.. and it was SUCH a pathetic tiny little thing that was far worse than any bodybag rose I'd ever bought! It was DOA... so much for Music Box. I demanded a refund as they'd already charged my card for the 3 roses I'd ordered, but Twilight Zone & the other one .. can't remember now.. was backordered for months. Never again will I order from Edmunds... especially since Palatine sends such GORGEOUS roses! What I'm going to do is use my planter pots that I cut the bottoms off, put those around the tips of the canes I'll have sticking out of the ground (I'm burying them about 2' deep), and then putting mulch inside the planter pot so they're 100% covered until next spring. Once I'm sure that the winter's over, then I'll pull away *some* of the mulch, but I will not remove the planter pot until after Mother's day. That's what I did with the two roses I got from England and they're some of my biggest, healthiest roses I have. I've already dug the holes and will be putting in topsoil in those holes and not native dirt ("crap").

Since we stay warm so long, we're supposed to wait and mulch after it turns cold. The trick is, sometimes the cold comes on suddenly. If I only had 4 roses, that wouldn't be an issue, but I can't rush out and mulch 30 new roses on short notice. Oh maybe i can, if I have nothing else going on...aaack.
I'm kind of in a frantic mode right now. I just got home from 2 weeks out west, and my youngest daughter has TEMPORARILY moved back home while job searching.....and I have to be ready to help her move wherever she gets a job...(anyone need a mathmatician?) .and my husband is coming home after working out of state for 5 months. As soon as he gets here, we start the next phase of remodeling, so gardening goes way down in priority. I'll have to adjust to family and contractors being here instead of the peace and quiet of just me and two dogs. I really like working from home, alone, after years of having crowds in my face for 12 hours a day.
maybe I should get busy digging holes too. That might ease my stress a bit.

As you suggest, digging all the holes in advance takes away the stress of a big rose order. Whenever I find myself stressing over what I'm going to do, where I'm going to place the rose, and so on, I dig a hole. And I keep digging until I'm tired or the stress subsides or I have as many holes as I have incoming roses. I wonder if your daughter could help you dig holes? Or perhaps you could employ her to count them for you. With holes in place, when thirty five plants arrive on your doorstep at two in the afternoon, you can get half of them very well planted before you go to sleep the same night, and the other half done before lunch the next day.

At pinch points in the garden schedule, I tend to forget that the purpose of the garden and the keeping of it is to reduce stress and increase quality of life.

As for remodeling, all I can do is wish you luck. And mention that we've been there and hope never to go there again. We had contractors adding on to our house for a job they swore would not take five months. it took the best part of a year. There was a solid week of jackhammering. Contractors wondered aimlessly through the occupied quarters regularly. Drywall dust encrusted everything we own several times despite painstaking efforts on the part of the contractor to isolate the addition. We found it so disruptive that we had to schedule trips to hotels in far away towns for three and four days at a time in order to regain some modicum of emotional equilibrium. I do hope your experience is better.

Thanks, Steve. We're on year three with maybe one more year to go.
Pulling weeds and digging holes are great stress relievers! Last year when I had contractors here for 6 months and was supervising it all myself, i pulled every weed on the 10 acres.
This year I'll dig trenches, I guess. Actually I do need to dig shallow trenches around the flower beds up near the house. I'm putting bricks in the ground level with the soil so i don't have to edge the beds, but can run the lawnmower right up close. Hopefully the grass won't invade the flower beds as badly either.
After we dig out and repair the foundation on the west side, then remove the brick and windows and replace the same brick and install new windows, then I will have a new area for a rose bed. That side of the house gets so hot that the brick buckled and pushed the foundation in, causing huge cracks, making the basement flood. Once we have the brick laid correctly, the roses and a pergola I have planned just might be enough to block some of the heat. I hope to plant grapevines along that side, too.
We have a south-facing slope that I hope to plant in grapes in a few years. I've been visiting with vineyard owners in Kansas and California about types of grapes, and there's so much to learn. I think instead of spending time taking any more classes or even reading, I'm just going to rely on advice from successful growers. According to the people I've talked to, I have the perfect site and soil. There's a great winery near me that will buy the grapes if I plant the varieties they need. Sounds like a fun project to me! Wine and roses, great combination!

A low point in a recent remodeling project here was the day they were running a jackhammer IN our living room to level the floor for tile. I was at work and no one thought to turn off the air conditioner so the resulting dust was distributed throughout the house. I think had we realized the floor had a hill in the middle, we would have stuck with carpet!

Oh my!

Porkpal, our last house was a quad level. We had carpet at the ground level garage entry and I always hated how dirty the carpet was, so we pulled it up with the intent of tiling a big area in front of the door and at the bottom of the stairs. AFTER cutting off the carpet, we noticed a bump in the concrete where the slab had settled away from the piers. We didn't think about getting a jackhammer. Instead, we had to lay new carpet in a big room. What we did was draw a curvy line that left the bump under carpet and tiled the rest. It looked pretty artsy because we had a good carpet guy and I did the tile.
In the older house we're in now, we had to jackhammer out a portion of the basement floor because I moved a staircase and we had to pour support piers. The surprise there was the old basement floor was 8" thick. Way way better than current code. Concrete was so much cheaper in 1967--the porch and patio we tore off was 8" thick also! Too bad it had settled towards the house instead of leaning the other direction.
We kept a big part of it and put it out in the yard under the firepit. The previous owner had scratched their initials in the wet concrete with the date and we thought that was worth keeping.
The rest was recycled as riprap on our low water bridge.

I'm getting ready to rip out the carpet in my basement (fully completed basement) as it's the original 1983 carpet and, with the cats & dogs (plus the previous owners' cats & dogs), it's time to replace it. I have a "floating" concrete basement. Instead of a single humungo slab, the basement's made up of 4'x8' slabs of concrete. That way, if one shifts, it doesn't screw up the entire basement. Pretty nifty design. Not too keen on replacing the carpet (mostly doing it myself), but it needs to be done. Got a nice roll of baby blue carpet pretty thick 15'x16' for $134 and a 7/16th moistureguard carpet pad for $55. I didn't think that was too bad.. an entire room's worth of carpeting for less than $200, plus some elbow grease (now THAT'S the painful part).

I sold some of my humungus bluebeards from my pond area. They were overgrowing EVERYTHING. My pond got eaten by one of them. 2 plants had taken up a space about 12' wide and about 5' deep. That's where I'm going to be putting the Blue Nile & Charles de Gaulle I'm getting in from Palatine. And maybe Moody Blues... all depends.

When we moved here, we tore carpet out of the 'lower level' (which is five feet off the ground at the front ) of our house. It was nasty. And the reason - we came to learn - was that the previous owners kept 17 dogs inside the house. Once the carpet was up we learned that the concrete work was so uneven it made even the most coordinated person sway and stagger like a drunken sailor when walking over it. Technically speaking it was out of flat by maybe as much as an inch. And in random ways. We were determined to put in tile because we both suffer horribly from allergies. Instead of jackhammering we had the whole thing 'floated.' The tile person came in and leveled it with some sort of special mortar before laying tile. In another part of the house with another contractor they did the same thing using Artex, I believe. That allowed them to plane or sand the surface smooth and flat. I didn't pay too much attention to the technical details because I had selected really hard and tough tile that could work with just about any material between it and the concrete.

oops



Just called Palatine to pay for my order (I have the money, let's give it to Rachel!)... and.. uh, well, added yet another rose. Buxom Beauty. I thought I had ordered it from her but I didn't. yay!!!

I'm glad you got this one, too, Toni.

I'm sure Rachel appreciates your generosity. I hope the flowers are both as fragrant and as well formed as they appear to be large. It really looks like a flower that would be hard to ignore in the garden. And sometimes it's purplish!

I had ordered Buxom Beauty from RU, but it didn't survive. I *thought* it had survived, but whatever bloomed today is definitely not Buxom Beauty, but.. maybe a Charisma clone of some kind? I'll post a pic tomorrow..