You really are an artist, Melissa. Here, I am leaving plants natural with the exception of Lady Banks on a pergola. You might have to hire someone who is up to this. I hope you can find someone. What a glorious project!

Melissa, after looking at photos of TT, my vote is that it will be worth whatever effort it takes. Of course, I'm not the one who has to make the effort, lol. But the rose is a beautiful monster, and I know that if you can bring your vision to life it will be spectacular. Best of luck!

John

Well, I'm severely over-tired and probably shouldn't be writing, bu my go-to comment is that treasure Trove, like Bobbie James, is meant to grow up a tree. It puts out those LONGGGGGGGGGG, very upright canes... I cant's see it on a pergola. I think in this situation I'd try to plant a Paulownia tree near by, and try to get it up in the tree...or a cypress? something fast -growing. But I just can't see TT on a pergola.

Yes, it WOULD have to be an extremely strong pergola-like the ones they make to hold up wisteria. I'm still kind of surprised that you got TT on any kind of pergola, since I have this idea of it's canes being quite stiff and upright,however it's true that plant habit can well be affected by whether or not it has a support on which to lean.

Black locust trees are very weak- I think their root system is quite shallow. So many of them fell down on the road up to our old house. Weakened by drought, as soon as wind , rain and snow came along, many of them succumbed.Pawlonia wood is supposedly quite hard and good for making furniture, etc, but I don't know about it's root system.

I guess I'm so tired for several reasons. It's just been one thing after another in these past years: first of all, that health crises; I wonder if I'm still feeling the effects of the chemotherapy (cisplatinio is a very heavy-duty drug). Plus, doing all the follow-up is very tiring, too,for me and for my DH (who works full-time). Then along came the pandemia,and now, this new, awful situation. I feel psychologically exhausted.

Then, there's all the work I do,out at my land. I want so much to get that situation somewhat under control so I'll have more time for painting, etc, but I lost so much ground while I was sick and my hip was so bad. This dam' drought is contributing a lot to the general feeling of exhaustion: I've started watering and that means I have to bring in water as well ,but that takes up a lot of time and energy as well.

In fact, it's everything, bart. I feel much the same way, except I haven't had severe health problems, and my garden is at my doorstep. That's interesting about Paulownia giving good furniture wood. I don't find black locusts particularly weak-rooted--I've never had one uprooted, anyway--but they're horribly brittle, as our spectacular ice storm in 2017 proved. When TT's black locust went over, it snapped about six feet off the ground.

I hope you get to feeling better soon. I hope it RAINS soon!!!!! I watch with amazement the exuberance of our garden's spring growth, all of it accomplished with no precipitation since mid-February, and without irrigation. How do the plants do it?

I don't find TT all that inflexible, and it wasn't particularly hard to train when we had it on the pergola.

Do you have good trees in your garden? What a piece of luck for you, if so.

Update. I've had a cold the last couple of days, but yesterday felt well enough to go down (in my pajamas) to the shade garden and prune away dead growth on 'Treasure Trove'. While I was at it I studied the situation. There's more plant life there than before, which is nice when you're gardening on decaying sedimentary rock; the one remaining double white 'Officinalis' peony is sprouting--and so is my nearby colony of 'Mollis', which I had feared the prolonged drought might have killed--while herbaceous growth is growing in the scree, along with the three 'High Noon' tree peonies. DH came down later and unbolted a section of twisted rebar which we carried up along with other junk, and I tidied up some of the remnants of the old pergola, furthering order in the chaos.

During our evening Skype call with DD I asked her advice on a new pergola. She approved of the square-in-cross-section steel tubing I had in mind, and suggested that verticals could be slipped over the vertical heavy rebar rods that are already in place, and told me how to connect them. How handy to have an engineer in the family, and DD likes nuts and bolts. The twisted rebar we may be able to cut into short lengths to keep in place the rough terraces I make of pruned branches, and which some infernal animal keeps tearing up. When I was disassembling the lower part of the wrecked pergola last year I laid out TT's long canes along the steps; one of those canes has mingled with the double yellow Lady Banks rose growing down there, the one that froze to the ground in 2018 but recovered, and is finding its way into the trees. With that rebar gone I can resume the formidable job of pruning the yew hedge that grows alongside the steps.

This whole area needs a reworking, and I can see how to do it. It's always pleasant to be able to plan, and dream.