Putting stuff in your garden

 

 

Ravenandrose

Treasure Trove officially added to a (short, so far) list of house-eating roses I NEED.

Excellent choice.  I would have had to have her if Peter didn’t.  I’m presently trying to decide if I could figure out a flight path for Paul’s Himalayan Musk up at Third House.  Rosa banksiae lutea is a house-eater, and, ironically, is getting going comparatively slowly.  I hadn’t planned for either Mme Alfred or Mme Gregoire at the cottage to turn into house-eaters—or Ghislaine—they just did.  I actually did know I was being silly about Souvenir de la Malmaison.  She’s not a house-eater, she’s just PERVERSE AND DANGEROUS.*  But the only house-eater at Third House at present is Bobbie James, who is cooperatively climbing the copper beech that hangs over from the cemetery.  Hmmm.

I wonder how I would keep the deer from eating them until they were big enough not to mind?

Ahem.  Have you read SUNSHINE?  Yolande’s peanut-butter-baited electric deer-repelling fence is not only for a world with Others in it.  Go google peanut butter deer fence.  Nothing works perfectly—and it’s a huge faff to set up and maintain—but it is pretty much your best bet.  The problem with all the repellents is that deer get used to them.  Oh, yeah, lion dung, big deal, have you seen any lions?  No, I haven’t either.  –And they’re apparently capable of developing a taste for hot chillis.  Electricity goes on working.

Angelia

My Ghislaine de Feligonde is veryvery pale yellow, aging to white. Even though orange is my least favorite color, I think that Morris is beautiful–does it have a scent? I always try to have an Abraham Darby, even though here it is always a less-than-beautiful beige color because I think it has the most wonderful scent of any rose I have ever grown!

Proof of the whole variable thing.  My Ghislaine comes out a deep orange gold and pales to primrose yellow—eventually, sometimes, almost white.  William Morris isn’t really orange, more peach, but she looks ORANGE next to the vivid, very lavender-pink James Galway.  Yes, she has a good scent.  But if Abraham Darby is a dull beige in your area William Morris will probably be grey.  One of the best rose photos I’ve ever taken was of my old Abraham Darby back at the old house.  She’s another of these gold-peach roses, but with a lot of deep salmon-pink as well.  And the flowers are HUGE.  This photo of Morris is a particularly romantic one:  if you like that style you should go cruise the ‘English roses’ aisles of whatever nursery you bought Abraham Darby from.  There are other choices, most of them not orange.

Thanks for the lovely photos…they have me wondering if I couldn’t fit just a few more roses in my yard.

Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Diane in MN

Deer, at least in my neighborhood, are quite used to dogs and not put off by them (or their scent) at all. Especially since they usually do their roaming and devouring when dogs are in the house and asleep.

Yes.  Suburban deer get totally blasé about all the usual human things.  It’s genuine countryside around here, but English villages are organised on a different pattern—houses tend to be squashed together in a relatively small area surrounded by swathes of farmland. **   There are lots of deer—Roe, around here, mostly—and don’t they just love people’s gardens.  And they get so frelling tame you can’t trust them to run away even if they see you shouting and throwing things.  Or to not panic and try to self-immolate under your car’s tyres.

Here are some suggestions: original scent Irish Spring soap, hung around the plants (temporary if you get much rain); blood meal-based commercial repellent (kept them out of my hostas for a long time); hot pepper spray (also temporary with rain). I’ve ordered a new repellent based on citrus that gets fairly good reviews; I figure if I put out a variety of stuff, they won’t get too accustomed to any of it.

No repellent ever worked for me or anyone I ever talked to for more than a year, and often less than that.  Maybe your MN deer have enough more options to be more amenable to being repelled.  One of the few clear benefits of a move into town is we no longer have a deer problem.  I’m still kind of half-expecting them to figure out Third House.  It’s only one block over from farmland and the fencing is inadequate even for keeping next door’s frelling terrier from crapping in the drive and the entire neighbourhood of cats from crapping everywhere.  It wouldn’t slow a hungry deer down for a moment.  Arrrrgh.

Judith

If you’re not a rose person, what are you doing on this   blog?

I do wonder that sometimes, especially since I also dislike pink.

Snork.  The funny thing to me is that while I like pink I’m not the pink obsessive that the blog persona is.  It’s a handy hook to hang silliness on—and it’s true that if the colour choices are black, white and pink—I’ll take pink.  This is a rant for some other evening, but I spent most of my life bucking against my inner girlie girl, because when I was a kid and a teenager forty and fifty-plus years ago being a girlie girl—especially with a girl-next-door face like mine—was death to any kind of being taken seriously.  I professionally hated pink for decades—and burst out of my parents’ house into jeans, Frye boots and black leather.  I revel in pink—and pearls—now partly as a nanny nanny boo boo to all those jerks who tried to make me believe that frilly and trad feminine equals stupid and wet doormat.

I do feel awfully ignorant sometimes when looking at the rose pictures. I’d never guess that some of those flowers were roses. If I were walking through a garden with a rose person, I’d embarrass myself saying, “Oh, look at those peony beds!” And, “Aren’t those great carnations!” I think I referred to the (hydrangeas? I forget) in my yard in front of an expert once as “snowballs”, but the expert never blinked an eye. Someone else later told me what they were, but I then later forgot again…

Well.  There are roses bred to look like peonies and peonies bred to look like roses.  Ditto carnations.  There are begonias and geraniums that look enough like roses that if you aren’t paying attention to the leaves you’ll think they are roses.  And there is a perfectly good category of hydrangea called snowball so the expert probably did blink, in appreciation of your terminology.

I know petunias, and crocuses, and daffodils, and tulips, and lilacs, and (my favorite) lilies of the valley, and daisies, and black-eyed susans, and poinsettias, and marigolds, and sunflowers, and forsythias…and that’s probably about it!

There are pink lilies of the valley you know . . . the cottage garden is OVERRUN with them.  I like them, but I also rip them up by the bucketfuls.  Not my fault, by the way:  my predecessor put them in.  I also suspect there are petunias, crocuses, daffs, tulips, lilacs, sunflowers and marigolds that you wouldn’t recognize as such, because that’s the way plant breeders are—oooh, they say, let’s see if we can breed something that doesn’t look like what it is.  I personally think trailing snapdragons, which usually have weird little turned-up faces that look more like roses than like snapdragons, for example, are a mistake.  And black-eyed susans . . . there are a million daisy-ish things that get called black-eyed susans:  the rudbeckia family is GINORMOUS.

Oh, yeah, and another favorite: Morning Glories.

Ah yes, bindweed by any other name . . . bindweed has the prettiest little morning-glory flowers.  It’s the same family.  Here’s another rant for another night:  how narrow the line is between fabulously desirable garden plant and migraine-inducing detestable weed.

Gardening.  Eh.  Another of those pursuits of the mad. . . .

* * *

* It’s been drizzling just enough for frelling Souvenir to say YAAAAAAAAH!!!!! and ball like crazy.  No proper RAIN just Souvenir dis-enhancing mist.  Note that I am ALREADY sick to death of watering.  It is my least favourite garden activity:  I like weeding and pruning and tying up and tying down and swearing and all that:  I HATE WATERING^.  And apparently we’re about to have a hot dry stretch^^ like what the rest of the world calls summer, I can do without it.  I like a little light complaining about not having the opportunity to wear my more amusing t shirts, since it kills the purpose if you cover them up with a sweater.  And sunlight is nice.  But we don’t need it all the time.  Grey and miserable!  YESSSSSS!  That’s what I moved to England for!^^^

^ The woman whose garden is full of pots.  Whose pots are full of pots.  Whose pots’ pots occasionally have pots in them.

^^ The moment the last of Souvenir’s gigantic midsummer flush has gone GREY-BROWN AND MOULDY. 

^^^ Oh, and Peter.

** Although this is changing.  Not in a good way.