"Bad hair day" does come to mind

I agree That this was a serendipitous grouping. I have similar in my hundred plus year-old house most notably Nww Dawn that were planted along ballustrades soon after they were available in 1930. I couldn't have chosen better.

"Bad hair day" doesn't do justice to that boisterous beauty. I would say "wind tossed tresses on a sunny beach", lol.

Good lord, this is beautiful Jackie! I love a wild tangle of abundance like this. Romantic poets and pre-Raphaelite painters did their best to channel this sort of energy. They would love to spend an afternoon in your garden (as would I).

That is so sad Jackie! Your climbing roses are some of the most incredible mature specimens I have ever seen. Very sad news, but I am excited about the possibilities of your new rose plantings.

Would have worked if the house was a tall stone mansion. Plantings of anything always have to fit the particular setting involved or they end up being removed.

Embothrium, I'm really sorry that you are having a bad day. Hopefully leaving cold-hearted comments on Jackie's thread has cheered you up. ;)

Jackie, I so love the romantic beauty of your climbing roses. Share lots of pictures of them with us during their last year on your house. I love seeing pictures of your unique garden. It’s so unlike any other garden here.

Stephanie - OK, here is one from this Spring, when the banksia lutea was in full bloom. Also one of my Anna Olivier, which will have to go too.

K S 8b Seattle - thank you

Flaming other posters is not a laudable contribution to a thread. Wanting to live in a fantasy world where no limitations and parameters ever exist is childish.

Jackie, Oh they are so beautiful! Anna Olivia is especially romantic.....something about that blush color. Do you know any photographers that could capture the beauty of your house this summer. I feel like you need a coffee table book to keep these beautiful memories. Your house has so much history and these roses are absolutely entwined in that history.

Oh and I hope you will forgive any implication about your photos, I was just thinking that photographers usually have very expensive cameras that could capture so well the beauty of your house as a keepsake.

Jackie - this is an unspeakable tragedy! I can't believe after all the years the roses have been there that now they have to be removed. I don't see how green, lush, living plants would catch fire any more than the bare wood of the house and roof itself. The plants would probably keep sparks from starting on your house. I would be absolutely devastated.

Your home and property is such a treasure - an heirloom. I wonder if you had it declared an historic property the city would have to leave it alone? I can't think of the correct terminology, but you know, when a property is declared historic and you then cannot remodel or alter it in any way that changes it's appearance.

Well, the silver lining would be the new space for new roses, but that can't make up for the loss of so many truly spectacular climbers.

Please keep posting photos of everything as they continue to bloom and change over the spring and summer. And Stephanie has a great idea of making a book. You could probably write and illustrate a book on the history of your house and neighborhood and all the roses that grow there - I would buy it! If you're not up for that, at least you could make a Shutterfly book for yourself. Or even just a loose leaf notebook with photos and explanations of what everything is and who planted and when. It would be part of your family history that needs to be documented.

Can you tell that I'm really upset about this? I just hate the politicians that don't know anything about anything making the rules that we have to follow!

@BirdsLoveRosesSoCalCoast Fire mitigation is a real and important thing. It doesn't matter if a plant is alive and green, it can absolutely burn. CO was absolutely devastated this year by fires, countless acres of forest, live and evergreen trees. Fortunately some homes were spared because they did not have trees right up next to them. If a wildfire comes to your doorstep, no plants next to your house is safer than plants next to your house.

And that is not to say that it is not devastating to have to remove those absolutely stunning roses. I would for sure cry several times if it were mine, and I'd be in denial for as long as possible.

The thing with the county where Jackie lives is that it is something like 80% open space covered with trees and other dense vegetation (historically, it's a fairly high rainfall area of California and relatively lush), and many of the houses seem to be nestled in these types of areas, with lots of vegetation around them. Very pretty, but also dangerous -- most of her county is rated as having high or moderate fire risk -- it seems to be practically all wildland interface over there (and likely why Jackie has such cute deer in her yard). Plus, not having had many wildfires in the recent past makes the likelihood of catastrophic fire worse (lots of fuel to burn), especially in a severe drought year like this.

This is in contrast to where I live, in the semi-arid grasslands of Livermore, at the other end of the SF Bay Area. We get only about a third of the average annual rainfall that Jackie's area gets (not enough to support more than few, very widely-scattered trees) and there's not so much to burn. What there was near us that could burn went up in a doozy of a fire (third largest in history of California, 400,000 acres that hadn't had a fire in at least the past 100 years) last summer, in the mostly chaparral (some oak woodland in the ravines and canyons) vegetation just south of us. Though winds moved the fire our way, to within 5 - 6 miles of the south end of town, at that point it had to jump irrigated vineyards and cross a bunch of grassland with not so much fuel, so firefighters were able to hold the line.

So, I'm not surprised the fire departments in her county are taking a tougher line this year, though it will be sad to lose those spectacular roses. But, with the drought water emergencies and restrictions that will likely be imposed this year (already declared in some northern California counties -- what storms there were this winter mostly tracked south), there's the additional problem of keeping roses and the rest of the landscape irrigated enough to survive anyway. I heard they were talking 40% reductions in Jackie's county, on the radio the other day. I'm even now working out strategies for my own roses and garden for when the water use reduction mandates that are likely just around the corner for us are put in place.

The reality of growing roses in California (or anywhere, for that matter) is that it's never a sure thing, something that's going to last forever, so enjoy growing your glorious roses to the nth degree while you can and then remember them and the pleasures of it fondly ever after.

On the original topic, I've ended up with inadvertent melanges of roses, too, though not to the amazing extent in the first photo of the post,. My favorite is a climbing miniature pink China (was supposed to be the shrub form of Old Blush, but not) that ended up climbing throughout a Mme. Alfred Carriere that is climbing through a CA pepper tree. They seem to get along well.

Thank you all for your thoughtful comments - I really appreciate them.

Catspa is correct - the fires are real. Although most of the county I live in has been spared for the last 100 years, nearby counties have had horrible (not a bad enough word) fires every Summer lately. The lack of rain this past winter is also real. It has been raining a LOT sort of every other year here lately, and then a year of much less rain. Since it does not rain hardly at all May - Nov, we are now stuck with our very local water supply in the reservoirs, so water restrictions are also real.

So, I am trying to get reconciled to the situation (and stop being in denial and hating the bureaucrats - they did not create this situation, and are trying to manage it the best they can). Of course some of the regulations have already caused push-back - one town a few towns away passed a law mandating that EVERY single home owner in the entire town had to pour 3' of concrete around the perimeter of their houses. Think about it - costs an enormous amount. That town got sued by the residents, who won the law suit, and the town was forced to amend that law (concrete no longer required). Our town's fire law is being enforced by the Fire Department, who have turned out to be way more reasonable than the actual language in the law (which can of course create other problems). They came to look at our garden, and so far the only roses we have been asked to remove are the ones touching the house.

BirdsLoveRoses - your argument about the roses protecting the house made me laugh, because that is EXACTLY the argument my DH tried to make to the FIre Dept inspector who showed up (He was not doing a formal inspection - we are not due for that until AUG). I think they chose August because, as per your Houzz name, the birds do love the roses, and there are some nests in the climbing roses, of course. Hopefully they will be empty by the time we have to take the roses down.

Jackie

Jackie, your attitude is far better than mine would be. I would be stamping my feet, waving my fists in the air and crying my eyes out. I bet there's not one gardener on the committee that makes those decisions. Your home must surely be a landmark and a destination for locals to show off to visitors from other areas. Yes, get as many photos as you possibly can and spread them amongst your family in case some were ever to get lost. This is the first I've heard of roses being a fire hazard. May Jacqueline's New Garden 2021 be just as floriferous and satisfying as the ones you will have to tear down. Thinking about this makes my heart hurt.

flowersaremusic - Thanks! Makes my head hurt too.

Jackie

Jackie, Your house looks dramatic from every corner and it must stop traffic! I have a question for you, I just noticed that you have wood sidings on your house too, how often do you paint sidings? What brand do you use? Thanks

summersrhythm - actually, our house is shingled (I believe its official architecture is " Queen Anne shingle style). That's one of the many reasons that the Fire Dept wants those roses growing on it gone - some of the shingles are actually over 100 years old! It was built in 1905, and my DH's great grandfather purchased it new in that year. So funny - he and his wife were immigrants from Germany, and his son married a lady from a German family also. Long story to answer your question, but I have discovered that at least THAT German family is (all of the generations) very thrifty. So, when my DH and I got our house completely painted about 8 years ago, there were only 2 coats of previous paint on the North side ("does not get sun, therefore the paint is perfectly good - why waste money painting it again?"), and 3 on the other three sides. Ignoring the North side, that means it has been painted 4 times in 115 years. Not what I would recommend (although it is a chore to paint it - we had 3 stories of skafolding up for 5 weeks), but it was intriguing when the painters showed us that, under the 1 layer of bluish grey paint which was on the entire house before we had it painted a grayish green, the North side had a pinky beige layer of paint, which we know from family history was the ORIGINAL color of the house, and IMO the original paint layer! Pic of the house right after we got it painted below, FYA:

Thanks Jackie! Your house is beautiful! It’s good to know wood siding does’t need to be painted every a few years. We just moved in a historical home that has wood siding. It needs to be repainted. We are thinking about doing it ourselves since it’s a federal style, 2 stories. It’s pretty big, we will have to do one side at a time. Do you remember what paint brand your painter used by any chance? The paint still looks new on your house. They have done a very good job.

Jackie do you know type of would your Jacky do you know type of wood your shingles are Made from? Is it stained or actually painted? As I'm sure you know, old paint was extremely different and wore differently so it wore off as opposed to flaking off as modern paints to. Therefore it was only necessary to paint quite rarely.

Speaking generally, it's still only necessary to paint relatively rarely in these parts of California, as little as every 20 - 30 years. The mildness of the weather doesn't beat up exterior paint like it does in harsher climates. My mother lived in the same wood-sided house in Sonoma County (northern SF Bay Area) for over 60 years and it needed to be painted only twice during that time. In contrast, the wood-sided house my husband and I had when we lived in western Massachusetts needed to be stained every third year. (Ditto replacing mufflers on cars, by the way -- every 3 or 4 years in MA vs never in CA :-) )

Those are the biggest roses I've ever seen. Will you be able to transplant any of the existing climbers to a new location away from the house? Even cut way back to rootballs that can be scooped out and moved by Bobcat, they might survive a summer move. A new steel pergola could provide climbing support, way away from the house.

That's the only rose house in the US like that, I hope it stays still, won't change. It's a historical place with an awesome sight.

Jacqueline - Your roses are truly spectacular!! After reading all of the posts here...I can see why it's necessary to remove these beautiful specimens. Truly a shame. I also love your beautiful, beautiful craftsman (?) house!!!

Re transplanting such large roses (or anything else), in this part of CA you're usually just as well off planting a new gallon-sized plant -- in a few years, the new start will have caught up.

For example, with olive trees, about 15 years ago, a neighbor up the street tore down his house and erected a custom-designed Tuscan-style "faux chateau" on the existing foundation (never mind that all the other houses in this early-70s development are still in good shape and currently selling for $1 - 1.3 million...). Of course, a Tuscan-style house needs an olive tree out front. So, the owner bought a mature olive tree in a huge crate, which required a crane and a sizable crew to plant (was quite the production and drew a crowd...) At about that time, I planted a one-gallon named-variety olive tree from Harmony Farm Supply in Sebastopol (excellent source for fruit plants of any kind, if you live in the area) in my backyard. The mature olive tree up the street failed to establish and went into a decline within a few years and required rescue pruning and other measures that, to this day, has left it at half its original size and somewhat iffy. Meanwhile, my little gallon-sized olive tree is a good-sized tree, already, larger and far healthier than the one up the street, and that's with no direct summer irrigation (he likely does have roots sneaking into the closer irrigated rose beds).

With tea and tea-noisette roses around here, too, you can have a humungous plant in relatively short order, even starting with just a band, because the climate is so kind. Here's a 'Jaune Desprez' I bought as a band from Vintage, about 11 - 12 years ago, yesterday (the bay tree it's in is kept at 20', first photo is from neighbor's yard):

Looking up from my side:

Here's a 13-year old Mme. Alfred Carriere that's more than 24' up a pepper tree:

This is with very mediocre, not to say terrible, soil, and no special effort on my part.

The shingles are cedar, the old ones, and the new replacement ones in some spots. The paint we used the most recent time it was painted was Benjamin Moore.

Jackie

Thanks for the info Jackie! :-) We have cedar siding too.

You are living the dream, cat spa!

At least when it comes to roses, Vaporvac, it sure is, or any gardening, for that matter, as long as there's water (no guarantees on that from Mother Nature here).

applw_pie_order, we do have a plan to take out several enormous non rose shrubs (see above), and make a new (fenced!) rose garden. One of them is a barberry which has deadly thorns 2 inches long arranged in threes so that one thorn is always pointing up, like a caltrop. The others are not so obnoxious, but I will not miss them. However, we will not be trying to dig up and move roses. My plan is to root cuttings of my favorites, so we can grow them in pots while our current drought is going on, and then (hopefully when we get a normal season of rain) plant them in the ground.

Catspa - I LOVE your roses! Thanks for the ideas - the FIre Dept is not making anyone take out any trees - just limb them up 5' or one third of the height of the tree, whichever is less. So, I am now going to walk around and peer at our trees with plots of using them as rose supports. Also, below is a picture of a (wooden) structure my DH built for me years ago which holds one of the huge shrubs up (the shrub is to the left of it). The Fire Dept HATES this structure, viewing it as an elevated pile of kindling, which I do sort of understand. My DH is now calling people he knows in the metal welding business to see about getting it replaced in metal. Then, with the huge shrub on the left gone, I could use it in the same way hopefully to hold up a climbing rose. I am so thankful to him for thinking about using this "opportunity" to make more ways to grow roses - it has really improved my mood.

Jackie

Catspa - Holy Hannah!!! It's like you live on another planet to grow roses like that!! I can hardly believe it!!

Jackie - what an awesome husband! You have been blessed with him!!

Oh Jackie that is wonderful news! I join folks on this thread at a sense of dread at digging out the absolutely spectacular roses around your home. For rose lovers, your home is a kind of National Monument that simply can't be recreated by starting again even a few feet distant elsewhere. Being able to come up with a compromise solution that still reduces the fire hazard is a sigh of relief for you most immediately, but for all of us vicariously.

I had to laugh at the "elevated kindling" comment about your lovely trellis. I think it will be wise to build your new metal trellis under the old one and get it firmly established before demolishing the wooden one or you'll never be able to wrestle the rose onto the new structure again. At least wood is destructible. I agree with rosecanadian that your husband is a jewel of rare price to partner together in creating a beautiful as well as safe and functional solution.

This reinforces my conviction that there is often an optimistic response to many situations if we have the creativity and tenacity to look for it. Optimism can still be realism as long as we are considering the whole picture of the situation at hand, and willing to do the work to balance the factors involved.

Cynthia

Going up trees is what tea-noisettes seem to best like to do, Jackie, so if you've got the trees for that.... MY plan was to train those two in the photos along the fence, but the roses themselves had other ideas and there was no stopping them! Over on the other side of the yard, "Florence Bower's Pink Tea" keeps flinging herself off her trellis and into a nearby Rhus integrifolia in tree form, from which I am constantly pulling her long canes. "No, no, no," I say, determined not to lose that battle, too. :-)

catspa - lol :)

cat spa, wow! Those roses are fabulous!

Catspa, your pic of MAC has given me hope! I planted one under an ornamental plum tree years and years ago, and it's just this year getting far enough into the canopy to get summer sun and hopefully take off. If it gets to be half as glorious as yours I'll be extremely happy!

@jacqueline9CA Do you have to completely dig up the roses on your house? Roots and all?? Or can you cut all of them to the ground/not dig them up, and just keep cutting them back until wildfire season passes? Isn't it kind of seasonal? Like hurricane season is for us down South?

If so, I suppose there would be no point in keeping roses there if you have to cut them all the way to the ground each year—you won’t get much beauty from them before It’s time to hack them down again :(

sorry. I thought i had a solution, but now that I’m typing it out, i realize it‘s not really a solution....

Nippstress - a National Monument indeed! Love it!

Bridget - our season for wildfires just officially started this week (they base it on temperature, wind, and how dry the wild plants are), and goes until November, so that is 7 months. The huge climbers on our house could be kept shorter, in theory, but the last time we cut them down to 7 feet tall (so that the house could be painted), they went right back up 3 stories within a few months, and I really do not feel like dealing with a constant pruning effort. The Fire Dept said I could plant small shrubs in that bed, including roses, as long as they do not touch the house, so I am contemplating some antique polyanthas or whatever, if I can find some which would stay smaller.

Jackie

Ugh, Houzz ate my comment. Jackie, if you're into keepsakes, and you happen to have blooms on those roses right now, you can memorialize them. Use silica gel bead things to dry the blooms & preserve their color, then encase the blooms in resin. I'm sure there are other great ways to keep a bloom from each, or just to preserve them somehow, if you wanted to do something like that.

Jackie - I like your idea of antique polyanthas. Let us know what you decide. :)

Marie Pavie is fabulous with a super musk fragrance and almost thornless ! Perle d’Or gets a bit taller and has huge beautiful red thorns and one stem perfumes a room.

Perle d’Or

Marie Pavie

Oh my goodness!!!! Gorgeous!!!! Your Marie Pavie is a super bloomer!!! Good gravy!!! And your PdO picture is heavenly!!!