What happened? No pics showing on my screen.

: (

Kate

You shouldn't toy so with our emotions in that title :)

-"the Interested"

That isn't fair! Come on, Give.
kay

Well that was a tease. ;p

Let's try this again...

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Tiny bush with a huge, fragrant flower

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La France

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Le Vesuve

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Westside Road Cream Tea

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Souvenir d'un Ami

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William R. Smith, still a young rose

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Souvenir de Pierre de St. Germain, leaning drunkenly into Sophy's Rose

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Mme. Dore with surrounding rodent protection

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Belinda's Dream, about a year old from a gallon plant

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Miss Atkins - two years old and I've already had to trim her twice!

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A very juvenile Cl. Lady Hillingdon, but seemingly happy

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Leveson-Gower - a slow grower but lovely nonetheless

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Mutabilis against the house wall making a comeback after a drastic haircut about a month ago

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Sea Mist aka Lavender Mist - pretty flowers and delicate foliage

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Overall bush shots

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The lanky Yves Piaget - only tolerated because of the gorgeous flowers

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Cels Multiflora, a tall and thin bush

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A better view of Cels Multiflora's lovely flowers

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Marie Pavie, tiny but cute

My sincere apologies; this has never happened before and it failed the second time my husband laboriously put the whole thing back in again. I'll try this on a new thread since this one seems to be a bust.

Ingrid

Absolutely gorgeous, Ingrid! I love these vintage photos. I love your roses dignity standing on their own. I have so many fillers I really have trouble getting a whole plant shot.

Sheila, I'm really puzzled how this old thread of mine came up again, and I can see the pictures twice. Everything is so different, the garden is younger and the majority of those roses are long gone. No wire cages, and everything looks hopeful and happy.

It's me again Ingrid. I'm reading old Tea Rose posts, and I can't help but comment. Your garden now is so beautiful too. The newer and older are both great.

This isn't the first "old" thread to have popped up since the new format was introduced.

Your garden is still beautiful, Ingrid. I must say that I'm amazed at that Souv. D'Ami; mine is so darkly, intensely coloured; it looks just like Archiduke Joseph that is next to it! It's nade me rather shy about Teas, since one of my first experience with them was to get these two and the Georgetown Tea. In pictures the flowers looked so different from each other,but in my conditions they looked SO similer. I moved them, but somehow Souv and the Aduke ended up side-by side...

...sort of the colour of Ingrid's here-pictured "Souv. de Pierre de Saint-Germain,now that I look again at the fine photographs!

Do you still have your lovely Cels Multiflora, Ingrid? It always gives me a heart-stopping moment when I see your pictures of it. Sadly I don't believe it's available here in Aus, at least it wasn't last time I looked, a few years ago, when I was still optimistically planning a garden here.

Sheila, you are so kind, but I know that the carefree and innocent beauty of that long-ago garden is gone forever. Now it's more effort, saying good-bye to my irises and hello to the cages, and worrying about the endless periods with no rain, but this is reality, and I'm determined to make the best of it.

bart, I know something of what you're talking about. With me it was my plants of Mrs. B.R. Cant and to some extent Le Vesuve. I suppose it's lack of rain and intense sunshine that cause the red coloration. I wonder if it's the teas that have a lot of China in their ancestry that produce the darker coloring.

Comtesse, Cels Multiflore is long gone. It fell victim to the blackspot that began with Burgundy Iceberg which you can see right next to it and affected several of the roses nearby before I finally took them all out. It's not something I would do today but at the time there were always new roses I wanted to try which made me very cavalier about discarding roses. I doubt that Cels would have done well in the heat I have now; it was such a delicate plant. I'm not sure whether it's often available here, but I haven't really looked for it. It's lovely seeing you post; I know it's not easy for you.

Your garden is still beautiful... I recognize Marie Pavie from a recent posting...

I like the frog statue, good to see that he is still watching over the garden. :)

Bart, That dark Souv d'un Ami from the Tea Rose book is the one I wanted, which I latter learned might be Gen Tartas in this country. I got my Sov d'un Ami from RVRs and it is lighter and maybe the one Ingrid had possibly.

Ingrid, your garden is always a delight at whatever phase in its evolution! Truth be told, it's something of a relief when I see that others on the forum face similar challenges and worry and must strategize, improvise and carry on with a spirit that tells me I am not alone.

I'm glad Sheila revived these shots of your roses as garden shrubs! They are immensely helpful for those of us who have a stack of potted teenaged Tea Roses chomping at their bits as we find ourselves forced to move beyond the stage of gazing and admiring so that we can get down to the nitty gritty of soil digging and spacing and planting in real world beds. Like others, I am enamored of gorgeous, romantic blooms and thoroughly enjoy seeing close-ups posted on the forum. But when it comes to actually growing Duchesse de Brabant, Odee Tea and others in my garden, the first thing I do after ordering is to sit down at my computer and search for mature shots of these lovelies as garden plants. I have bookmarked many of your threads, as I do others' on the forum, so that I can plan ahead for size and habit and save myself loads of transplanting and second guessing. I don't have the extra time or energy to spend reinventing wheels. :-)

Thank you for all your posts over the years, Ingrid. I was enjoying and learning from your garden long before I ever joined the conversations here. And Sheila, thank you for bringing this thread to the foreground. Carol

Such a treat to see these photos of your 'once upon a time' garden, Ingrid. Thank you Sheila. And Sheila I love seeing photos of your roses and companion plants. Please post more.

As for relief, Carol, if I could (broken camera and don't know how to post from my phone - and I used to be a computer programmer!), I'd show you a picture of a young Mrs BR Cant, still seemingly suffering iron deficiency (along with a heliotrope), despite treatment, sitting in a sea of bare soil, only alleviated by the occasional weed.

You know, I have actually been considering just such a post. If I ever got to where I could attempt photos, I thought that would be my first post. But then I look at all the beautiful roses and gardens posted and think it would be too much to subject you good people too. Maybe a hint or so, if I ever get that far.

Mary, you'd be surprised at what most of us are hiding off-camera. It wasn't always so in my garden, although I know many of you have struggled with rabbits, deer and dire diseases like RRD for years. I was trying to cope with a difficult environment and poor soil, but this year I was able to add bunny predation to the list for the first time. I have a feeling that the future will bring further challenges to many of us since we live in a world that will only become more unfriendly to all living things. Perhaps it's time for us to show the bad with the good more often, just to keep things real.

LOL, Carol!!!

I wish to claim the prize (there is to be a prize, I'm assuming?) for Worst Rose Garden, on the unbeatable grounds of there being no roses in it at all - except, of course, in my imagination! And in endless pages of sketches, notes and lists which I come across from time to time in old notebooks, and sigh again over the beauty that might have been...

Ingrid, I'm sorry to hear the lovely Cels isn't amongst your rose survivors. That was a rascally Burgundy Iceberg to infect his neighbours with blackspot - not something I'd particularly mentally associated with your hot, dry garden's issues. He looked so pretty next to Cels, too - who'd've thunk it?

Re predations from local wildlife: FWIW, I did once read of an organic veggie gardener who planted a border of big juicy green lettuces all the way around his garden's perimeter, and swore the dear little varmints thereafter only went for the yummy, tender lettuces and left all his more prized veggies alone... Commenters IIRC were sceptical, insisting it would simply attract to the garden more hungry visitors, who would eventually find their way further in, for a change of flavours/ and to complete their recommended daily multicoloured antioxidant dietary requirements...

Anyway, I thought I'd just mention it; perhaps a different kind of approach to muse about, anyway... though I realise probably well beyond your capacity at the moment, since it would mean raising and then planting out a few packets' worth of seeds/seedlings... not to mention the need to improve the soil for them to grow in... Unless of course you were to set up straw bale beds... but somehow I can't quite see you and Cecil lugging around dozens of straw bales at the moment either...

Carol, I am honoured to be a sister of the spirit! Even if it's in failures!

Comtesse, interesting information on straw bale gardening. I used to dearly want a straw bale house. I could have almost built one with all the straw bales I've spread around the garden. Did you see on another thread, the link to grow bags? The fellow uses supermarket bags (the sort you pay $1 for), to grow plants in. He puts them in a kiddies clam shell pool, with a few inches of water, to save him from having to keep watering them. The results are extraordinary - something to do with air-pruning.

Building on the Comtesse's thread, I was wondering: mightn't a hedge of rosemary be more feasible? not that the rabbits would eat it, but I have heard that grazing-types animals prefer to avoid places with a lot of rosemary; it's scent ,if planted in abundance, is strong and masks the scent of the predators,so animals that tend to wind up as being preyed on don't want to stick around too long, since it inhibits their self-defense. I use rosemary a lot, meself; I have even noticed that it does have some deterrant effect,though it's no magic solution. My experience: I planted a Cedrus deodara in an un-fenced-against- deer area,protected only by a large neighbouring rosemary, and the beasties did leave it alone for it's first years. Now, last winter, they DID get to it ;I was afraid I'd lost it, they damaged it so badly, but when I finally got down there I saw it was re-sprouting nicely from the base. At that point I put a cage around it, of course. So, you say, silly bart, it didn't work. Well, yes, it sort of did and didn't. We all know that if pressure is too great, deer will eat anything,and they get used to certain deterrants in time ,etc, etc, etc. But I did buy some time for myself and the tree. It may well have been far more effective if there were more rosemarys around, forming a hedge; I have noticed in other cases that a nearby rosemary does tend to make a given plant less of a target for grazing. Besides, rabbits are not deer-they'd find the rosemary branches right in their faces. Rosemary also would not require much in the way of soil preparation, either, or watering. For what it's worth, my aim is to eventually surround the entire perimeter of my large garden with these attractive, no-care evergreen shrubs; it'll take a lot of time, probably, since I only put in a few plants each year,but as I say, I think it does help. It's just part of an IPM program to help keep mammal pests down; it's not "the" solution.

Rosemary is a good idea as a deterrent where you have plenty of room because it gets really huge, at least for me. I have a row of them on top of the stone wall at the back, but my areas for roses are all small and bordered by pavement so that wouldn't work I'm afraid. Now that the rabbits have eaten all of my irises they've turned their attention to the roses and are eating up everything as far as they can reach. There really is nothing to be done because there is very little food left for them in the wild. I think gardens in ever hotter areas all over the world will be faced with this problem. I've begun to plant lavender and alstroemeria between the roses in the hope that the rabbits will leave them alone, at least for a while.

O boy. I wish I could think of something to help. But alas, it's true: drought does "force" animals to eat whatever plants are still alive; since your plants ARE irrigated and therefore alive,there probably really is not much to be done. Let us pray for rain.

I think you are very right, Ingrid; as humans take up more and more space on this planet, animals are left with fewer options. How does prostrate rosemary do there? There’s one I’ve gotten here in FL that has a pretty small footprint, about 8” tall and 24-30” wide?

I was thinking of the prostrate/ground cover type too, Perma! Also wondering if perhaps its woody stems might help create something of a physical barrier?

That's just based on thinking about those rings of twiggy branches you were using round some of your roses, Ingrid, as a deterrent - I don't know whether/how well they worked though... I imagine hungry bunnies would eventually learn to climb over them? But maybe not if they smelt of rosemary?

Oh - just had another thought, following on from the above. What about, for now, anyway, using lots of cut off branches of the enormous rosemary plant(s?) you already have, as barriers, thus combining both physical and scent-based deterrent properties? Either circling each rose of strewn everywhere between the roses?

Thank you all for your concern, much appreciated. What happens with the rosemary is that the branches lose their needles fairly quickly, especially in the heat of summer (111 degrees today) and there are just a bunch of ugly sticks lying around. I'm more of a mindset of not fighting nature, and just choosing taller roses that are sturdy enough to withstand having their lower leaves eaten and still thriving. I've noticed that they so far are ignoring thick, leathery leaves like Aloha's, and that's another hint about which direction to go in choosing new roses should any not survive. I think I may eventually have fewer roses, with some toughies and the rest only in places that receive afternoon shade.

Ingrid, are you considering Rugosas? They're not elegant like the Teas, but they are certainly tough, and have thick leaves and lots of prickles. I have Scabrosa, which, as you can see, the bees fight over, and Blanc Double de Coubert, which I think is said to be very fragrant, but as I've squashed it behind Scabrosa and G Nabonnand, I never manage to get to! And of course, they have lots of prickles to deter hungry bunnies.

Trish's Garden · More Info

Here's another photo, Ingrid, of your future Marechal Niel. You only live once.

Sheila's garden. · More Info

I don't know why flat Madame Antoine Mari decided to photo bomb this thread. Ingrid won't like that, MAM!