hello Anne, Xeramtheum and the others. Thanks for our interest and comments.
I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a sub tropical area to the south of Brazil and Uruguay, with a very long growing season, high humidity and only brief, rather warm winters, which is why we usually get only half dormancy.
My ZD is about 1.80 m tall, it produced all that growth in one year and a half. So far I have been growing it in a 0.45 cm deep pot and she looks OK, although it needed regular spraying to fight back powdery mildew and blackspot. I have read that climbers need time to get established before giving a good display of bloom.
The location is reasonably good, with many hours of morning and afternoon sun and fairly well ventilated.
I give Zeffy regular pellet feeding too and lots of humus , but apart from the only three flowers it produced (responding to last year's pruning), all the new growth has given nothing but leaves. I have not done any pruning this winter and it is already leafing out.
I grow another Bourbon in a large pot, Souvenir de la Malmaison, that blooms really well in spite of mildew and black spot attacks , but of course, it is not the climbing sport and it has a moderate size.
The reason to consider growing ZD in a pot is simply because I only have a small garden with nearby walls, and the best spots in he ground are already occupied by other large plants, like Compassion and Clair Matin. Besides they grow against a wall, which is not convenient for mildew prone varieties. In that respect, the large 1 m deep pot offers an advantage as I could place it in a better, more ventilated position.
Enough for now, I do not want to make it too long. Needless to say, I would love to keep ZD and see it smothered in bloom, even if it lived a comparatively shorter life. But I do not know if I stand any chance at all and had better offer it to a "foster family with a large garden" (I shall never get one!)
I will be looking forward to more feedback.
