Hi everyone, I'm Steve. I have lived in lots of places including PA, OH, MI, TX, & NJ and I have tried to grow plants in all but one of them. My parents gardened because that's what one did and derived no noticeable pleasure from it. So I was over thirty when I stuck my first plant in the ground. It died. Most of my plants did back then. But somewhere along the way something didn't and that proved to be enough to get me hooked. Early successes were wildflowers (scarlet flax) and a couple of roses from Antique Rose Emporium ( Fortune's Double Yellow and Climbing Old Blush).
I grew roses in NJ for thirteen years and at the end of that stretch had 50 or 70 roses in the garden, and had killed more than twice as many. My technique was quite Darwinian. Plant the roses, water them in, don't let them get too dried out, move them if they obviously don't like the spot. And otherwise leave them alone except for annual fertilization and pruning every three years. The roses that survived this treatment I learned to respect as worthy garden roses. The ones that failed, I'm afraid, I learned to dislike in proportion to how quickly and completely they failed. Belami, for instance, is pretty close to the top of this list.
When my wife retired, we moved to AZ because I, like roses, do not fair well where the humidity exceeds about 40%. We chose Prescott because the weather here is less severely cold than it is in Flagstaff and less severely hot than it is in Phoenix. And because there's enough rain most years to keep well established roses alive. Also, we just like it here in the mountains. Most of our 2 acre site is boulders the size of a garage, and the rose garden is but a tiny strip of land about 80 ft wide and 150 ft long by a seasonal creek that runs about three months per year. By the end of this season it will be so crammed full of young roses, that - if most live- I probably won't have good reason to buy a new rose for a decade. So I'll have to depend on excuses.
