21,402 Garden Web Discussions | Roses


Wait. Can we rewind this discussion?
A Leopard slug? Really?
I thought they only ate rotting debris, as well as other slugs. In other words, they are good slugs. They love the compost areas and work damn hard over there, and I have never seen them eating any living tissue off my plants. I have seen them eating other slugs, the kind I do see eating green leaves on my plants. I have some self sowing seed plants in my garden as well as tender lettuces we grew last year. I have seen none of these disturbed by the Leopard slugs. And actually, I think our bad slug population may be down.
Are you sure a Leopard slug was the culprit?
I've spent tons of time watching and photographing them during the night. I think they are so cool looking. I love the leopard slugs and they are welcome in my garden. I encourage them by keeping pockets of dried leaves packed down in corners against the stone walls they like to hide in. I had them in my last garden several blocks over and at my studio space pot garden, but not here until about four years ago. I was glad when they finally showed up.
Right, I know… I get the grossed out looking at rows of dead squirrels but go out of my way to photograph the Leopard slugs in the garden in the middle of the night. At least the leopard slugs are alive for their photo shoots. :)
And no worries about the link Lucille! I'm a big girl and the web is full of all kinds of weird, wonderful and creepy things. We are all responsible for our own clicking! :)
For the record, I've been a serious vegetarian since around 1984 or so, so I spend very little time looking at dead things, either in the back of a truck like the pictures or at the grocery store. I'm not sure where I thought the "gallery" tab would lead me. Not there, though! Poor little squirrels. I can't even kill the white slugs I pick of my plants. I gather them in a tupperware and put them next door in the wooded yard of the neighbor or in the hellstrip by the road. A bit nutty, maybe, but I like to feel I still fit in on this board, none the less.

Well, I didn't get up in the night to see. ;-)
They are fascinating creatures and I used to leave them alone... I thought it was pretty cool how they would forage at night and then find their way back to their one personal hidey hole each morning.
I also hoped they would cannibalize on the little slugs....
I think I ended up with quite a population of them and then I started noticing buds missing. Some buds were scooped in half in a very smooth way(toothless). A couple of bands seemed to be growing in reverse. I could not figure out what was doing it, until reading that these slugs like young plants and do eat flowers. They can eat crops faster than they grow.
I could be wrong, but what else could eat a bud like that?
I keep the garden mulched with bark and so there are no leaves about.
Anyway- I wish it wasn't the slugs because I heard they eat mold and other slugs and would have kept them. They are cool looking too. but, Nothing was eaten after I rounded up a bunch of them ( 6 or 8) and flushed them.
I dropped their numbers in the rose beds. I am sure I still have plenty of them in other parts of my garden as the slime trails exist on the walkways. Im fine with them there.
This post was edited by lola-lemon on Wed, Mar 6, 13 at 12:30

Wow, thank you guys so much for the information. You all mentioned aspects that I hadn't even considered. I have always planted New guinea impatiens so I don't think mildew would be a problem. But for their first season outdoors, I think I will just stick with plain roses:)
Maude

I got to this thread late, but just want to say that I LOVE forsythia! Peonies too!
I don't know whether this has to do with my having lived all my gardening life in mild zone 8 climates with long wet winters, but I never get tired of that blast of early spring yellow. Forsythia is common here, too, Suzy, so it isn't a question of rarity. When I moved from Florida to western Washington years ago, suffered through the long dark winter, and then saw first thing in spring the forsythia lighting up yards, I swore I would have it. Crocuses likewise, and for the same reason. Of course the shrub has to be allowed to grow naturally as a specimen plant and not be tortured into the shocking blobs one often sees, nor planted in masses.
For the rest we're having a gray and miserable end of winter here too, even though we are in zone 8; still, quite soon we'll have spring which is lurking behind the current curtains of rain and clouds, so are among the fortunate. The snow has melted--at LAST--and the hellebores, sarcococcas, fragrant daphne, and first fragrant violets are in bloom, as well as Cornus mas in the woods.
Suzy, about peony foliage, how about the varieties that color well in fall? I don't think their foliage looks bad in the summer; it may not be striking, but there's nothing offensive about it. Concerning the blooms, I'm getting fond of the officinalis varieties. They bloom ahead of the lactifloras, which extends the season, and they take our climate fine, which is not surprising considering that the species is native to the Apennines. And all the herbaceous peonies are fun in the spring when I go looking for their emerging buds and watch them develop.
Spring is on the way!
Melissa
This post was edited by melissa_thefarm on Wed, Mar 6, 13 at 6:16

HI Melissa, glad to see you surviving the Italian election fiasco.
Yeah, I s'pose I am being abit mean about paeonies too but you know how it goes - you start to garden and are faced with big empty spaces. Some plants, particularly paeonies, hellebores, penstemons, bearded iris do sterling duty at filling these spaces, even after the blooms have long gone over. Hellebores particularly have been a go to plant for me with the large evergreen leafage which fills what would be a sparse spring border (once all the little bulbs have finished). Even so, after a few years and many seed sowings, space is suddenly not the thing we feared, but a precious resource.....and all those great wodges of herbage become truly annoying, shading out the little treasures and just lying there, greenly boring, for weeks, months on end.
In the past, I did a lot of shifting around between garden and allotment, filling dozens of pots which reclaimed much of the pavement at the front and back of my house. I now find myself in a position of enforced reduction, at least until I have some space whipped into shape in the woods (and having watched it spring into brambly life the last couple of weeks, this is going to be a long (and back-breaking) project - thank god for bribeable sons with machetes and mattocks. Remeber your early days? Well, we don't have the slopes or landslides, but we have tree roots and potential tidal flooding.........
All the best gardens are born in adversity, wrenched reluctantly from the soil.

Ah well, Florida, this is the heart of the matter - where you are situated and what plants are natural in your landscape. Here in the UK, a palm with a rose would be, quite honestly, something of an abomination. I tend not to follow many design 'rules' but following the vernacular architecture and keeping to the normal planting zones is a creed I rarely deviate far from.
Personally, I generally find attempts at formal grandeur or (worse) a cottage garden in a modern urban plot to be both pretentious and even faintly ridiculous (although I vastly prefer ridiculous to pretentious).
Although gardens are total artifice, I like to at least nod towards a natural combination - woodlanders growing with other woodlanders and not scorching alongside bedding geraniums or south african daisies.

Campanula, you articulated my frustration with the local design meme. Naples is a beautiful place, but my favorite garden landscapes are found in the older 50s and very small post victorian neighborhoods here. You will see some fantastic specimen plants (particularly plumeria) in these places. The more prosperous and popular areas tend to be more uniform because they are professionally landscaped for part-time residents. I am even guilty of this because the climate is so hot, and landscapers are not too expensive. So, in planting roses, I'm rebelling a bit. There is a fantastic gardening history around the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford estates a bit north in Fort Myers. They planted with local materials, but with structure. I may need to visit again for some inspiration.


Well, think about it a minute. If you are going to put down an "organic" fertilizer such as alfalfa meal, it takes time for the alfalfa to break down into something the plant can actually use. So early is okay, because it's going to be a while before the plant can use it. The stuff might not break down for a long time depending on your climate--how moist, how humid, soil temperatures, etc.
On the other hand, if you are putting down a fast-acting chemical fertilizer like for example Miracle Grow, it is going to work right away--does it need to work right away in early March? Maybe not.
And then there are slow-release chemical fertilizers, Osmocote being an example. Osmocote is temperature-sensitive as far as the release goes, so if the soil is still fairly cold, nothing is going to happen for a while anyway. So if you are time-pressed later on in the spring, you might get it done now and be done with it.
Something else to take into account is the weather and your climate. If more frosts or snow are expected, of course wait.
Don't worry too much about the exact right time. After you've been gardening a while, even getting around to putting down some fertilizer is a major accomplishment. ;^)
If all else fails, read the directions on the package. They are usually pretty good.

Thank you. I have never used alfalfa meal, didn't even know it was good for them. I did read about blood meal last year but thought it was a little late for it. Would now be a good time to apply that? Should I use alfalfa meal instead or since I am new to this just stick with the commercial fertilizers? So much to learn and everyone seems to like something different. I think the only thing agreed on is that black spot is the bane of everyone's existence and it is terrible in Alabama. I would like to do anything I could now before the other yard work starts to take much of my time. The only thing I have done is spray for black spot. Didn't know if it was early but had rather be safe than sorry later. It got ahead of me last year and I never got it under control.

I'm glad that side path conversation was productive. I think it is OK to have them occasionally, after all, this is not the good ole girls country club where one is shown the door for behavior not comporting.
(Flags down the country club garcon and orders another squirreltini, where a decorative brushlike appendage is stuck in the olive with a toothpick.)


Don't get too much powdery mildew here, but then anything is possible. Black spot, silvery leaf is common after monsoon and then theres the Thrips. We did get a couple of good rains about 2 wks ago and of course the weather has been real screwy. Got snow 3weeks ago and now the day temp is in the mid 70.
I will go ahead a spray for mildew just to be on the safe side. If you can think of any thing else please let me know. Thanks

We usually have a good selection of striped roses, including those three, in our rose society rare rose auction, which is held in November every year. If you don't find them before then, please stop by our website www.ccrsauction.com in, say, August, which is when we usually figure out what we can sell for that year. Right now the information on the website mostly concerns last year's auction.
I also collect suggestions from whereever as to what people are looking for during the year, and I grow two of those three roses you mentioned (Camille and Alfred), so I'll try to get those started to give to the auction this time. Your timing in asking is just about perfect.
Thank you
Kathy

I got my Alfred Sisley at Roses Unlimited and it has done very well. Camille Pisarro is no longer available at Vintage and sadly won't be now that they are truly going out of business (buy what they do have, though to support them!). Edgar Degas isn't sold by anyone that I can find in the US now that Ashdown is out of business, but your best bet is to email Linda at Long Ago Roses because she has imported a lot of Delbard mother plants and is starting to offer them for sale as soon as she can.
Cynthia

Along with the lilies, Klaus Dalby likes allium sphaerocephalon (dark purplely red), angelica gigas (purple), a red old fashioned daylily (Crimson Pirate?), Dahlia "David Howard" (with purple foliage), crocosmia and astromera. Single apricot zinnias would also be nice.
Here is a link to a video from July 23 2011: http://youtu.be/xus9T0dB9c8
For earlier in the year I also like the orange foxglove (digitalis obscura?) -- I think I have one that I bought last year, which seems to be alive. In the nursery it was displayed next to a gorgeous bearded iris called Tiger Shark.

Technoduckling,
Personally, I wouldn't plant roses around lavender bushes.
Lavender at my home requires very little supplemental watering, it is totally care free.
Roses, on the other hand, in the hotest months of the year, really do require a nice amount of water, unlike Lavender.
Mabey you have a lavender plant I am unfamiliar with, so it likes water, idk.

Decades ago, I found it fascinating following the sports through the Camellia garden as they were listed on the tags. It honestly taught me what to watch for with mutations as you could trace the lines through the planting. It made for quite an enjoyable afternoon. Kim



If your bed isn't going to be ready I'd say wait until next spring but it's really up to you. I'm not big on fall planting because I've lost a lot of roses doing that.