The delicately lovely Duchesse de Brabant

Mme. Leon Pain, fortunately accompanied by a yellow day lily that has not yet been obliterated by the rabbits. I'm afraid she'll be next when their favorite food, irises, has all been gobbled up.

I couldn't help myself. Three glamour shots of Rhodoloogue Jules Gravereaux.

Gruss an Aachen throwing some near-white flowers into the mix.

And here is the lovely blush/white Marie Pavie.

An "honesty shot" featuring fetching hardware, some of it anyway. There's more in other beds, most unfortunately.

That Marie Pavie is precious. I'm glad you have your cages. They helped me so much this past Spring and I've left most of them on too.

I hate the screen of doom!

Cecil did a great job on cages. Your roses looks beautiful. At least they won't be lunch or dinner. Thank goodness :)

Ingrid, love the blooms inspite of the heat they look so healthy. So green and luscious. They are doing real well and thank you for sharing your pics with us. They look beautiful and I am so glad that I got RJG. Looking at yours made me so happy :)

Jin

Duchesse de Brabant is looking particularly elegant today! One thing I never get sick of: pink roses! Beautiful.

Carol, you are too funny. So, it is raining there while you are at a park. Your whole comment is funny. ..lol.

I am sorry for laughing but I am so glad that is not me Bec I will turn just like Grumpy from Snow White.

Jin

I never get tired of pink roses, especially ones as beautiful as your Ingrid. RJG is perfection and DdB is one of my favorites.

Marie Pavie looks like pearls... gorgeous blooms, all the pinks...

My husband puts a cage like this around one of the roses to stop winter rabbit nibbling, easy to use and remove later on.

Such lovely pastel roses!

Kate

I LOVE the RJG glamour shots! I’m with Jin—so glad I have a baby & cannot wait for it to be grown up and gorgeous like that! Your pinks are all just breathtaking Ingrid!

And thank you so much for including your cage photos and to Carol for your very astute assessment of what it means to be a real gardener. I think we do all have our own versions of these failsafes. This is just a fact of growing things, and we can make ourselves insane if we expect garden magazine covers all the time. (I admit I am a bit OCD about these things, so this some self-talk here!) I think these are all beautiful testaments to our resiliency as gardeners, and make the magazine-cover days all the more meaningful. :-)

Sheila, I spotted a part of one of your cages in another post and that made me feel a little better. Misery does love company!

Have I mentioned lately how wonderful you all are? Your praise and support lift me up and make it so worthwhile to go on and even to order more roses in the face of all logic against it. It helps that my husband says to go ahead, anything that makes you happy in these troubled times is a good thing. Your warm friendship and encouragement make me very happy indeed.

We feel so good when you post photos, Ingrid. I can't wait for photos of your new babies.

Checking on the pics. Yup, still there and looking great :).

Jin

Ingrid, maybe we should start a “show us your cages” post...I have ALOT of chicken wire right now and a gazillion bunnies and squirrels.

yucca rose, thanks for the laugh. We need to laugh, with the grim reality of ever-more hungry wildlife in dry areas. Okay, I admit it, I feed them dog food, because I can't stand to see them hungry, and I have the hope that if they're not so hungry they'll leave my roses alone. It's only partially successful since even my large tea roses are being eaten for as far as the rabbits can reach. This is the first year in 12 years of gardening here that this has happened, which tells me that the situation is getting desperate. If the rabbits and squirrels weren't being preyed upon by coyotes I would never feed them, but this way I'm also helping the larger mammals to stay alive.

I'm nodding in recognition and agreement. We do what we gotta do.

You're so right, flowers. Either we adapt or learn to love a garden full of cacti and succulents. Noooo...... I don't think so. Still, I really regret my blooming irises, which I had in bloom ten months of the year until now. The rabbits have eaten every single one down to the ground except the one that's caged. As soon as it has bloomed, the cage goes and so will the irises. I've ordered alstromerea and lavenders which the bunnies might not like as much, the former apparently being poisonous. One can only hope.

How well I remember my pre deer fence days when I sat in the garden and cried like a big baby. It was futile trying to grow roses, but I kept buying and planting them. Only other rose lovers understand this passion. Lavender and alstromerea will be beautiful complements to your roses and are lovely in themselves.

Ingrid, I have one other idea for you that I will cautiously suggest. I have a wildflower, Birdcage primrose, which self propagates and needs no water. It has a pretty flower and the cottontails love it. Apparently it is part of their natural diet. If it grows here, it should grow at your house. I DO sprinkle mine with the hose to keep them blooming all summer which goes a long way towards keeping the bunnies out of my roses. You can buy seeds online. I also have developed a new appreciation for cactus and succulents. Some cactus flowers are stunningly beautiful and there are some strangely beautiful succulents. I have come to realize that if I can’t beat ‘em, I might as well join ‘em!

prickly pear

Birdcage primrose

Yuccarose, that is so, so pretty actually the better word is beautiful. I totally forgot how beautiful cactus can be when they flowers. Anyways, your birdcage primrose is so bright and cheerful that brings a huge smile on my face. Brilliant idea :)

Jin

flowers, I would have cried too; deer can do major damage in just one night, and they can reach so much further than rabbits.

yuccarose, thank you for the tip about the birdcage primroses. That sounds like a winning idea.

How typical of you, Ingrid, to lessen your own varmint problem in relation to another's. Whatever destroys our roses and other prized plants, either from under ground or above, is as if a bulldozer plowed through our gardens, devastating everything in it's path, whether one bud at a time or whole plants. It makes us feel helpless. Cages are almost a garden feature where I live. No one gives them a second glance because they're so necessary.

For the record, when I lived in TX, people used to call prickly pear blooms "desert roses." :-) They are truly spectacular, as your photo shows Yuccarose! And something else amusing, a couple of my neighbors in Portland grow cacti. Yes, really. One of them grows a cactus garden that is actually pretty darn striking: desert plants, stones and boulders with driftwood accents. The other neighbor grows cacti in arty pots alongside other cottage garden plants in the garden. I had no idea that one could grow desert succulents so well in Portland. My neighbors must have paid solid attention to soil and drainage. Carol

Carol, I guess that proves we all aspire to what we really shouldn’t be able to grow because I, of course, would love to grow everything (especially dahlias) that you grow in Portland. I had forgotten about prickly pears as desert roses...here we think of adeniums.