Gardening Update #1811, or, Bleeding Profusely Again

 

I've been pruning roses. Well, tidying them up a bit anyway. I don't do much real pruning; I belong to the school of thought that says that a rosebush wants to be the size she wants to be, and she'll waste a lot of time and energy regaining that size before she starts producing flowers. This varies, of course; roses are fey fickle creatures, and some of them will let you hack them back and meekly produce flowers at the level you want. But my experience is that you will get more flowers if you (a) feed her as if she's the rooty green equivalent of an entire high school football team and (b) let her grow more or less as she wants.*

You wouldn't be doing real pruning this time of year anyway or you'd be cutting off your incipient floral extravaganza, which would be even more deranged than growing roses in the first place.** I tend to be so conservative about cutting back in the autumn that I frequently don't get around to it at all, partly because of that pesky time problem and partly because I worry more about die-back*** than I do about wind-rock†, which means I should do some kind of a prune in the early spring before active growth starts . . . but I usually don't get around to that either. Which means that when Jungle Season arrives it's bloody dangerous out there. Literally. We had the whole lacerated-scalp-blood-sheeting-down-forehead thing again today, only this time I noticed it before it started running into my eyes, and managed to dam it before it blinded me.

I have way too many roses that are thornier than average. I'd started by trying to cut out the dead under-bits of Mme Alfred††, who mostly hangs down rather gracefully, like a green awning, but the dead dangling under-bits will get you if they can. But Mme Alfred is only averagely thorny, and I felt quite calm when I moved on from her to Sombreuil. Sombreuil is not perhaps the rose that most needs a tidy-up (spoilt for choice in that category, I am) but I noticed that she had reached a long floriferous arm over the wall into my neighbour's garden, Mr Ugliest Shed in the Universe and the Roof is Ruining the View from My Office Window, Thank You Very Much You Blergwad and Furthermore All the Ground Elder in that Same Densely Shed-Populated Universe Comes under Mr Ugliest's Wall into MY Garden, You More Than Ratbag, You Unspeakable Fungus from Yuggoth.††† My Sombreuil isn't going to waste any of her flowers on him.‡ So I had to haul her back to this side and tie her down. Ow. Ow. OWWW.

One way or another I spent way too much time in the garden today: it's that time of year. And especially after that burst of decent rain‡‡ everything is storming up, and laying siege to anything it can wind its little tendrils around. If I'm lucky by the time Alicia-my-friend-the-serious-gardener arrives tomorrow we won't be able to get out the kitchen door. She's not likely to be in a very charitable mood because I'll be making her ring handbells.‡‡‡

Although I was thinking today as I found another forty-seven little things in pots tucked away in a corner that I'd forgotten about, it would be surprisingly, if horrifyingly, easy to make a National-Gardens-Scheme‡‡‡-level garden out of something even this size, if you were mad and focussed enough. I'm mad enough, but I'm not focussed enough—there are a lot of healthy, vigorous weeds in my garden and a lot of—ahem—unplanned and possibly insalubrious botanical combinations. I also have low tastes. Dahlias. Busy lizzies. Petunias. Roses. I got away with being vulgar at the old house because the setting was so gratuitously romantic even dahlias couldn't spoil it—and Peter provided a counterbalance of tactful perennials and a posh accent spouting Latin names—but if I were doing it in a tiny town garden I'd have to turn into a plantswoman and I'm not.  I'm not and I'm not going to.

But don't talk to me about Third House's garden. Third House's garden is another small town garden . . . but it's plenty big enough. Fortunately I still have low, vulgar, anti-plantswoman tastes. Which is just as well. I wasn't ringing frelling handbells and taking voice lessons when we were still at the old house. There are limits.§§

 * * *

* Sigh. The impenetrable-jungle aspect of the cottage's garden would be significantly less both impenetrable and jungly if I kept my roses to the sizes they're supposed to be. On the other hand, that would mean spending more time pruning, which means MORE TIME and also more blood loss.

** No, no, growing roses isn't deranged, but jamming nearly fifty into a space the size of the cottage garden is definitely deranged.

*** Where the stem-tips die, and you have to cut back to live wood. If you've already pruned too much off, you're in trouble.

† Where the wind knocks your rose around so much her roots start coming loose, so the wind is rocking her back and forth, not just the above-ground plant, but down into underground. Roses hate wind rock. Back at the old house I was always torn by the ghastly dilemma of choosing between pruning, and risking die-back, and leaving the above-ground growth available for the wind to get a grip on. Those short skeletal winter rosebushes you see in some gardens are pretty well wind-proof. But the tiny walled cottage garden mostly doesn't get bad winter wind. So I can pretend not doing the autumn prune is deliberate.

†† —Carriere, who is the creamy thirty-foot-high-and-launching-herself-into-space-over-my-semi-detached-neighbour's-roof one. I'll post photos of her this year too.

††† Except for the all-the-ground-elder-in-the-universe that comes in under the wall at Third House. Third House has major bindweed too, which also comes under the wall. Siiiiigh. Neighbours are the blight of a gardener's existence.

‡ My garden has the cottage on one side, obviously, and my semi-detached neighbour is on the left (as you stand in my kitchen door, looking out in alarm at the prospect), and Mr Ugliest is immediately opposite you. On the right is the neighbour who owns the downhill half of the two-car garage I own the upper half of.^ This is a nice neighbour^^ who furthermore used to have a Climbing Cecile Brunner on that wall so ebullient she used to come freely over to my side. I haven't seen her in a couple of years and I'm afraid to ask. It's all right though, I've put her—the rose, I mean, not the neighbour—in at Third House. Where she's joyously eating the hedge.

^ I keep telling you it's a jigsaw here. The little old section of a little old English village. Get out your micrometers.

^^ Barring their occasional visitor whose unnecessarily large shiny car's car alarm doesn't like anyone getting too close to it in the process of getting into the car next to it: Like we have a choice. Shut the ungleblarg up or I'll give you something to yell about. If there's an unnecessarily large (shiny: shiny takes up even more room) car next to Wolfgang, hellhounds and I must perforce sidle.

‡‡ Bronwen will be here too, but she's an untidy gardener, like me, and she likes handbells.

‡‡‡ She says perhaps a trifle grimly, and averting her eyes from the rain-wreckage on the right-hand wall as she looks out her kitchen window.

§ http://www.ngs.org.uk/about-us/open-for-the-ngs.aspx

I haven't looked at their guidelines recently but when we were opening our garden at the old house the rule of thumb was that a NGS garden had to have enough in it to remain interesting for half an hour. Hey, people crawling around on their hands and knees with magnifying glasses are really slow. Also leaning against the wall in hysterics at the pots-in-pots-in-pots-in-pots array slows you down.

§§ And speaking of Secret Projects, as I was last night in yarny terms . . . I now have a secret gardening project. Mwa ha ha ha ha.^ I potted it on today. Nice root system. If it croaks, it will clearly be my fault.

^ Although this blog business of having to third guess myself because not only do I not want either to Reveal All for a variety of reasons or to embarrass anyone but myself, which is the second-guessing part, I also have to—third guessing—allow for stuff I'd be perfectly happy to tell the rest of you, barring the One Wrong Reader. Feh.