Beautiful!!

Ingrid, This is really lovely, I must say! I'm glad you've finally gotten some good rain. I can empathize even living in Florida where it rains every day, except where I live. Finally, we are getting needed rain. I've got a container garden at my apartment and I'm absolutely worn out from watering this year! Twelve miles away at my work place it rains buckets every day. It becomes depressing to drive home in the downpours and pull into the complex and find that it is bone dry. Yes, I can truly empathize with your situation.

Your garden is magnificent as presented in the above photos. I love everything about it. The crepe myrtle standard is divine! Le Vesuve is dazzling and the rest of the roses look truly happy. I must repeat from an earlier posting, that your sea lavender is absolutely scrumptious to my eyes!

I hope the rain continues for you.

Jack

Le Vesuve looks glorious - so leafy, and what is the tree? in the 2nd last picture? I don't think I've seen that in your garden before. It looks beautifully set off by the monstrous boulder behind.

Trish

Nik - your theory explains what happened in my garden this past Spring - we had the best Spring bloom I can remember, ever! And, some of my once bloomers re-bloomed after 3-4 months.

Jackie

..I never tire of seeing your Le Vesuve Ingrid.... and good to see your garden on the road to recovery... Potter and Moore seems a rare Austin...

titian... like you I was enthralled by that pink flowering bush that I mistakenly thought was cascading down from the rockface, but Verdi Guy above has answered the question, that it's a standard Crape Myrtle... of course I can now see the trunk.. I realise I need new specs...

...Crape or Crepe? my default would be Crepe...

You know Jackie, us citrus growers (I'm just an amateur) know of a lemon cultivation method called the Verdelli treatment. It was originally refined in Italy but is now used the world over. It is used to invoke a second bloom on lemon trees during mid-Summer which as a result produces marketable lemons during next summer when northern hemisphere lemons are rare (common blooming time for citrus is early Spring). Not all lemon varieties are responsive to it but some (like the Feminellos) are. It consists of water stressing the trees on purpose to the point just before defoliation starts to occur (common reaction of citrus to drought). Then provide plentiful water along with increased nitrogen fertilization. The trees respond with a second leaf flush followed by new blooms during the summer, just at the time they would normally be too busy growing their fruit. Maybe nature has pulled a 'Verdelli' on your rose garden!

Verdelli lemons

Marlorena, Thanks for pointing out my misspelling. It is me, who is truly in need of new glasses and new eyes! LOL I've edited my post to show "crepe" as opposed to "crape."

Just a minor point, but I believe both "crape" and "crepe" are correct, with "crape" possibly being the older version of the word. It took forever for that one to grow compared to the ones in the back which are leafy down to the ground and not grown as standards. This last rain really energized it into growth and bloom.

Nik, your theory makes perfect sense to me. Where I live it's really basically a high desert and the native plants depend on infrequent rains to burst into bloom, especially in the spring after winter rains. I think everything in the garden was fooled into thinking these were winter rains and responded accordingly. We're beginning to put in drip watering but I'm not really sure it's the right thing to do. Flooding plants with a hose seems to promote the most growth and bloom, second only to rainwater.

Thanks so much for your appreciation. Marlorena, Potter and Moore is one of the early Austins which I believe Austin has discontinued, but for my climate it's been a very good rose. I had to move two bushes of Bishop's Castle from the sunny back garden, where they had always flourished before the drought, to the front, along with Carding Mill and Baronne Henriette de Snoy, two new roses which were languishing back there in the heat, and now all four have put out little leaves in their new homes, which is very encouraging. Madame Lambard still seems okay in its hot spot, but it gets lots of water from the big bowl in the kitchen sink. Apparently there may be more summer storms, unheard of before, but this is the new world order. Apparently our good fortune is causing massive heat and drought in Pakistan and India because of the huge shift of ocean currents, making this a very bittersweet experience, not that we have the slightest control now, after we've set the whole global debacle in motion. All we can do is be grateful for whatever we are given, which could all be taken away again in the coming years. It's almost imperative now to live our lives one day at a time.

..Verdi Guy... no problem, I agree with Ingrid that either is likely correct.... I did wonder if Crape was American English.... crepe reminds me of something nice to eat, so that's my excuse...

...I fear extreme weather of any description... being in a temperate maritime climate it's usually fairly balanced but I think changes are afoot here too...

..I'm about to upgrade to Windows 10, so wish me luck, and see you all around sometime when I've sorted it all out.... like in a month...

Flooding is the best, especially if your water is hard, but dripping saves lots of water. If you flood you need to take good care of fertilisation. Flooding flushes nutrients out of the rootzone fast. Main problem is with nitrogen. One can install a controlled liquid fertiliser appplicator to a drip system to do 2 things at a time. Liquid fertiliser should not pass through any metal piping or pump system just polyethylene tubing. Applicator should be adjusted to provide 100-150 parts per million nitrogen and the fertiliser should contain the recommended amounts of P, K and micronutrients for your soil with reference to the nitrogen applied. Hope this helps although it may sound daunting on first reading. Any professional company should know what I'm talking about.

..I sometimes wonder how gardeners in Mexico, like Baja California in particular, manage, or perhaps they don't garden so much... I would imagine they get the same weather pattern... or San Diego even, that's almost in Mexico, they must have some lovely gardens too...

..I must say Wild Edric has such good foliage, I ought to think about that one some time... but I'm delighted your Carding Mill and Baronne H de Snoy are recovering and moving forward.... I know it gives you great pleasure...

When the going gets tough you need to garden with natives.

Good to hear of - and see - the welcome effects of the rain... it's all looking lovely. Does the soil smell amazing after rain there? After a long dry here, it smells of incense!

:¬)

Ha, I love the smell of wet soil after a dry period but my SO really hates it! I remember reading somewhere that the smell comes from bacteria that are somehow activated when the first rain falls. I don't know if it's true though.

I've always loved the smell of the rain on soil, gives me an atavistic pleasure, probably because of what a good thing it is here. Nik, I might try natives this year in the spot that looks very bare after removing four roses. I do have the rose "Maggie" ordered to try there but there's still more room. I must confess the native plants here aren't much to write home about; you probably have nicer ones there. I'll just have to do some searching.

Ingrid, native or naturalized makes no difference in this respect. You have a huge selection of such plants available in California. The New Sunset Western Garden Book can help a lot.

Ingrid, I love seeing your garden. It is beautiful! Flowers are gorgeous!

Nik, naturalized would be fine; there's a much larger selection and I'm sure I could find something suitable.

Thanks so much, mustbnuts, for your praise and enthusiasm. I'm in a much better place now and am allowing myself to enjoy it more and more as it continues to prosper.

wasn't that rain great? I have flower buds everywhere. Happy you are seeing some success.

Drip and drought: my idea is that even with drip irrigation, do very deep watering to encourage deep rooting, and do it less frequently.

hoovb, I don't think we've had any pictures of your beautiful garden lately. Not to belittle anyone else's, but I identify with your garden the most since we're not that far from each other, and I deeply admire how you've creating beautiful scenes everywhere with your mix of roses and beautiful companion plants. I need some inspiration badly, and frankly I'm becoming tired of taking pictures of my garden when so few other people are posting photos. I know you probably concentrate more on your blog, and could you please post a link to that so I can bookmark it?

Rosefolly, just for clarification, do you mean deep watering with a hose in addition to the drip irrigation or letting the drip irrigation run for a long time. I've noticed that roses do best if I really flood them when I'm watering; that's what encourages the new growth.