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melissa_thefarm

Late October

melissa_thefarm
9 years ago

The weather has been dry and coolish for some time now, and we busy in the garden. Mostly we're engaged in cleanup, as it's really too dry to uproot plants from the propagating beds and set them in freshly prepared holes: if it were in the forties and drizzly it would be a different story. But we have plenty of weeds to pull and grass to cut, and time ahead of us to get plants in the ground.
I do like the blue and gold of fine mid-fall weather, with the leaves coloring and the hills blue-gray in the distance. We're having a warm autumn, though. We haven't started lighting up the wood stove yet, as the sun warms our thick-walled masonry house adequately; we've never gone so long without having a fire.
This is the time of year when the grass is growing well after the end of the summer drought. We also have plenty of hearty clover, which DH tells me is from the seed he cast here and there last year, bless his heart. There's a scattering of bloom on the warm climate roses, including some of the shapeliest and most delicately colored flowers of the year. 'Perle d'Or' is lovely, having profited by my digging around it last year and amending its soil, which it needed badly. 'Sanguinea' beside it is in bloom, and looking rather fine since I pruned away most of its dead and badly damaged growth, victim of past snowfalls and various pests and diseases. I think the Teas have suffered in the past two wet years, in heavy soil as they are. At least we've learned at last to prepare adequate planting holes.
I haven't heard much on the forum about 'Papa Gontier', but it is an indomitable rose, big, strong, cheerful, with flowers between red and pink, fading sometimes to lighter pink streaked with cream. PG has a climbing sport, which I have and kept for years espaliered on a wall with a northeast exposure, with 'Crepuscule' as its neighbor. 'Cl. Papa Gontier' didn't like its situation at all: it grew and grew, and gave me strongly the impression of a rose frantically trying to get to the sun. So last year we built a cantilevered rebar-and-bamboo trellis away from the wall and over the narrow garden walk, and trained CPG and 'Crepuscule' over it. Now 'Crepuscule' has a handful of golden flowers and I'm hoping for good things from both roses next May.
Our Salvia guaranitica in the bed next to the house normally freezes to the ground every winter and grows back over the summer, finally sprawling all over its bed and flowering in October with electric blue-violet flowers. It was so warm last winter that it never froze back, and now the Salvia guaranitica is fourteen feet tall and the bed looks like a jungle. It's wonderful. The lemon verbena, which also didn't freeze back, is huge, and is all interlaced with the mystery Tea, which is six or seven feet tall and STILL isn't producing good blooms: they continue one and all to ball. Well, it's still fairly young, about five years old, and has been growing fast. I'll look forward to better things next spring. Besides, by now it's too big to dig up.
Keeping company with the Salvia guaranitica, though thankfully just out of its reach, is 'Comtesse de Cayla'. It's true, as various folks on the forum have noted, that CdC's blooms fry readily in warm dry weather, but when conditions are right this rose is a total delight. It has dusky purple-red new growth and healthy, leaden green foliage. Its long, elegant, flame-colored buds open into luminous semi-double pink-orange blooms, sweetly scented. Everything about it is good to look at and pay attention to. 'Comtesse du Cayla' is a tough rose, too. This, the most prosperous of my three plants, is about 3' x 5'.
Melissa

Comments (5)

  • mendocino_rose
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Sounds like a good Fall. We've been getting a lot of work done now that I don't have to spend hours watering. Everything is happy with the mild temperatures. Fall bloom depends on the weather. Some years it happens in mid November. I'm just glad that the ground is moist. It's enough after this tough summer.

  • Marlorena
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    In this part of England where I am the weather has been so kind, and for so long this summer, I can't recall a year like it. My Bonica rose still has lots of flowers, Mutabilis never stops... and some newer English roses have done really well...yet I have autumn/fall colour on shrubs and summer bedding plants still very much showing off their vibrancy...

    ..your location in Italy sounds quite idyllic for growing plants, and I also have 'Sanguinea' although I think it's Miss Lowe's variety..

    ..I'm going to try some Tea roses for next year which I'm getting from a French supplier...nothing ventured....

  • soncna 9a Slovenia
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Today it was a really sunny day. I have dug holes for my roses all afternoon. Yesterday came first ten roses from Tuincentrum Lottum. And still there are many roses with blooms.

  • ingrid_vc so. CA zone 9
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    My garden (or parts of it) is slowly recovering after a brutal summer. With cooler temperatures many of the roses are putting out new shoots, and the new tea roses I've put into the ground are putting out new shoots and leaves very quickly. Several roses I was worried about have been moved to more suitable areas and they've thanked me by putting out new growth. SdlM had languished a bit this summer, which is unusual and due to the record-hot weather and drought, but it's now thriving, with lots of new buds and some opening blooms. My two Le Vesuve bushes have really responded to cooler temps and are blooming nicely. If we can get some rain within the next few days it would be immensely helpful, but so far the rain gods haven't been listening.

    Ingrid

  • muscovyduckling
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    For me it is spring! And the days are warming up. The more established roses in the neighbourhood are starting to put on a good show, and mine are just starting to flower. It's sort of like Christmas for me, as this is my first year with roses, and it's so exciting to see (and smell) them in real life for the first time.

    Sadly, with the warmer weather and frequent rains, the weeds are also out-doing themselves. I'm just letting them go though, because I'm busy smelling my little handful of roses.