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| Rosa 'Queen Elizabeth' |
I am an idiot where roses are concerned. I think they are a lovely flower, but they need more regular care and maintenance than I have tended to have time to give them. They bug me because they usually flatly refuse to 'get with the programme' as far as organic pest and disease control is concerned, and because their care gets done on an ad hoc basis - as today - I am never properly equipped for it.
That isn't to say I have nothing I need - I always have nice sharp secateurs, disinfectant wipes to keep these sterile, and the pruning saw for thicker stems, because the roses tend to get their prune when I am working on the fruit trees, but I never seem to have a tough pair of gloves to hand. I then persist in fooling myself that I can grapple with the plants without sustaining injury 'if I am careful'.
This is never the case, as the roses here either have giant dagger-like thorns or masses of sharp needle-like ones, if not where they are being cut, but where they have to be held, or on the bit that inevitably snags your sleeve when you try to bin the prunings later, and then glancing at my hand I'll notice a big snudge of blood... Today there is a jagged gash at the base of my left thumb and across the third finger of my right hand, plus a smattering of small puncture wounds, which isn't too bad. Autumn pruning, done with fewer layers of clothes on the arms tends to be a bloodier business.
The roses here have had distinctly mixed fortunes. Most were here when we moved in, a mixture of different hybrid tea and floribunda types planted together in a rather shady spot at the end of the garden and looking rather sorry for themselves, in what was to be the veg plot. So they were moved to the flower garden borders, where they have not exactly thrived either. That's a bit of an over-simplification. One plant does do really well - a strong, pink-flowered cultivar which I think may be R. 'Queen Elizabeth'. Another that seems to hold its own is, I think, R. 'Peace', though both do get black spot. The remainder are absolute martyrs to black spot and make whispy growth with the occasional half-hearted flower. I could be lazy and blame to soil, or the damp and cold climate, but they would probably all have more of a chance if I gave them more regular care.
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| R. 'Peace', I think... |
I've added a couple of Old Garden types (R. 'Konigin von Danemark' and R. 'Cardinal de Richelieu') and a vigorous species hybrid R. 'Sealing Wax', which flowers profusely in early-mid summer and is a huge hit with the bumble bees. These have done reasonably well, considering they haven't had much of a planned maintenance regime. And this summer I treated myself to some new David Austin roses for the herb garden, encouraged by their marketting as 'disease resistant'.
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| R. 'Sealing Wax' |
