(OT) After the rain

last year

last modified: last year

Well, the rain has come and gone. We got close to three inches of water, a lot for us, much needed after most of a year of low rainfall and particularly welcome as we approach what is usually the dry time of year.

The garden after the rain is not the garden of before the rain. Before, the warm climate roses were in full flower--and magnificent as can be; I've rarely seen them so fine--the early herbaceous peonies and the tree peonies' flowering was drawing to a close; so was the flowering of the spring bulbs. The lilacs and wisteria were fading.

Before the rain the woods were starting to leaf out. Now, everything is green, green, green; the grass was already lush, but the trees and shrubs are thick with foliage, still tender but with the leaves close to their mature dimensions. New woody plants are in bloom: snowball bush, wild hawthorn and black locust, mock orange, the pale fragrant wild honeysuckle. The warm climate roses are still flowering but, in need of deadheading and increasingly damaged by beetles and sun, the dramatic impact of their first major flowering is diminished, while the opulent once-blooming old roses have formed buds which are showing color. Likewise for the Lactiflora peonies. The modest weed, tall and slender, a member of the mustard family, whose delicate green growth served earlier as a fresh filler in the garden, is going to seed; I'm cutting and removing it, as it now crowds the garden which has filled with new leaves. The wild poppies, which have been in flower along the roadsides for several days, are starting to bloom in the propagation beds. I'm softhearted about these poppies: I think they're as beautiful and elegant a flower as lives, and I don't remove them if I can avoid it. They're annual and don't interfere with anything. Wild peas twining through the garden are another welcome sight, and silver-and-gold anthemis will be in bloom soon. The second Serbian bed out in the big garden, in most respects a mess, has beautiful wild herbaceous plants in flower along with the weedy grass: a bedstraw whose tiny flowers make a haze of acid yellow, a dusty blue speedwell, and, the crown, an enchanting annual pink that I've never noticed anywhere else: a pale silvery plant, as fine as filigree. Perhaps the seeds came in with the old hay we use for amendment. The money plant, another cheerful filler around the house and woods, has also gone to seed, and I'm pulling and removing much of it to make way for the growth of late spring.

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Melissa Northern Italy zone 8
Original Author

last year

Sheila, high winds are a pain, along with ice storms, and two feet of snow in three days...things like that. It's one of the reasons I work on trees and shrubs for the garden, to provide shelter. Condolences on the snapped canes, though both you and the roses will recover.

I remember how beautiful my 'Anna Jung' was, until she drowned in a wet winter. There are a lot of beautiful Teas that I don't have, a fact worth keeping in mind. But I have to give them acceptable growing conditions before I can try them again.

I'm inclined to think that spacing is a good idea. It may be honored more in the breach in my garden, but then the roses go out and out, and what can I do? It's hard to foresee how enormous they'll get with time.

Cold weather now will push summer back a bit, or at least, that's how I would look at it. It's beautiful here now. My sister took quite a few pictures in the drizzle; I don't know how she's planning on posting them. They're stopping back by for a couple of days between Venice and the west coast, and sis has said she wants to tour the big garden, which she hasn't seen yet, just the yard and the shade garden and the Rock (laburnums). I was down there this afternoon collecting a few cuttings, and the grass was thigh high. It would dress up the place no end to have it cut, but the motor scythe is at the repair shop, where they say they can't get the necessary belt, so it appears we will have to wade through the sea of green as we look around.

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Comments (6)

roseseek
last year
Congratulations! 3" is a real blessing!
Melissa Northern Italy zone 8 thanked roseseek
Melissa Northern Italy zone 8
Original Author
last year
Boy, isn't that the truth, Kim.
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Sheila z8a Rogue Valley OR
last year
Melissa, how wonderful about the rain. I do wish it had waited until your relatives took photos of the early bloomers. The cycle continues.

We have had cold and wind here along with rain. My Madame Antoine Mari flopped over on Anna Jung and I am trying to decide what to do. MAM may be my best Tea. Anna Jung is younger and I placed her incorrectly evidently. Should I move Anna or prune a space for Anna to grow up through the flopped MAM? I am considering bracing MAM to remain in her spot but that might look ugly.

I guess wind patterns might need to be another consideration for planting. The Tea flopping problem gets corrected when new growth evens the plant out. The scaffolding under a Tea can help hold them up but MAM got very tall and top heavy and hence the flop.

This wind whipping canes about has snapped some wonderful new basals on Anna Jung and Bleu Magenta for example. These were crisp large lovely basals now truncated. Boo Hoo.

I have also had Maman Cochet and Comtesse F. Hamilton flop backwards and no harm done since they did not flop on another rose.

The crowded roses billowing into each other can be beautiful in it's own way. I do think fondly of Ingrid's single row of Teas well spaced.

I do love the wind blown Monterey Cypress look. I just did not know it would happen to my Teas.
jacqueline9CA
last year
Melissa - I do hope some of those pictures will be posted on here - we all LOVE to see pictures of your garden! You are so good at describing it, but photos help too.

We have had a week of (for us, in May) frigid weather with horrible winds too - I think it is happening all over the US West Coast for some reason. We have 6 inches of potpourri blowing all around the driveway and patio, from all of the blooms which were fully open when the drying wind started. Sort of nice - like Fall leaves, except all rose petals. My other roses which were only partially out yet laughed at the wind,. but the tall bearded iris mostly fell over. Does not seem to bother them, they just keep sending up more blooms, from a horizontal position.

Jackie
catspa_zone9sunset14
last year
Sheila, 'Madame Antoine Mari', also a huge favorite of mine, though I don't have her at the moment, was the worst of the teas for flopping here, too. I tried internal bracing, but wasn't too happy with that and the wind still created breakage and holes. She did seems to fill in again fairly quickly, so eventually I just let her flop and re-grow. That does take space. (Lost her after about ten years when, for unknown reasons, she suddenly up and died -- something bacterial in nature, maybe.) I still miss her sumptuous, elegant flowers and will likely grow her again -- in a more protected spot. I just saved a still-wobbly, huge basal cane on "Hoag House Cream" from these wind blasts by tying it to a stake, in the nick of time. Wind is the devil, this time of year.