Cheery And Cheer: That Day In Pictures

Sunday, February 8, 2015

That Day In Pictures - Roses

Photo Credit belongs to Brittany Soucy

This is a picture of the driveway leading up to the kitchen door of the Yellow House. That gorgeous pink shrub on the left is a Meidiland landscape rose that I bought about 10 years ago at a nursery; it was a clearance rose grown on its own roots, weedy and tiny in a gallon black plastic container and it cost me about 5 bucks. The whole driveway is lined with roses like that one. But that is just part of the rose story of the Yellow House and it's a fine thing right now to look at roses and green, growing things with a snow storm howling outside my window. Which is a fine thing as well.

One of my email account names is rosamundi250 and I'll explain why shortly. We moved here to New England from Northeastern Nevada in 1998, almost 17 years ago. I had a tiny yard back there but it was bursting with roses; I had crammed about 50 in a postage stamp yard. There was almost no lawn to speak of because I had told my family that this yard belonged to roses and flowers and they could play in the big park right down the street. They were fine with that. When we decided to move to New Hampshire, I was filled with anxiety in only one sense; I was leaving behind the roses. And we were going to be students for a while and on a strict budget and how would I buy more? So, before the move, I dug up many of the smaller ones after pruning them, and I bought dozens of black plastic gallon pots from a local nursery for a quarter a piece. And then I proceeded to order dozens and dozens of old fashioned, antique, and modern shrub roses that I felt I couldn't live without. After all, I had an obsession that had taken hold of me over the past couple years and it was too new to shake or reason with. I repotted them in the purchased plastic pots and set them out all over the deck and yard keeping them watered while we packed up. All of those roses were crammed together in the Ford Explorer. And some had to go in the back of one of the moving vans where they wouldn't have any light for a week or so. When we arrived in New Hampshire, many of the tiny rose plants had lost their leaves and were pitiful looking. All these roses were the kind grown on their own roots, not bare root or grafted like you usually get at nurseries. So they had arrived in the mail with leaves and some even with blooms. Now they were sorry looking and I feared for them all.

The new yard was 2 acres and it was by no means prepared for a couple hundred roses. So after unpacking, I planted a few and then I placed the rest of them, cheek by jowl, on the back sunporch to over winter. I had no idea what I was doing. Most of them survived. I spent the following spring plowing up lawn and creating flower beds all over the place. My kids and some new friends helped me plant a lot of them but I planted most myself. I lost about 10 pounds that spring because I just dug and dug and dug every day. Almost all thrived. Over the next few years I bought about 50 - 60 more until I had around 250. And one of them was Rosamundi, a Gallica rose, one of the oldest roses in cultivation, from the 1500's. And she's striped. blooms outrageously just once a year, and her scent is heavenly. Here's what she looks like:

I planted roses all along my driveway, about 30 of them in two rows of 15. About 15 of them overtook the others because they grew so enormous, like the Meidiland (Scarlet), that the other 15 were crowded out and they just disappeared due to lack of light and air. Oh well. That driveway is quite a sight when they do their July thing.

Roses filled the back courtyard just off the kitchen, I planted them in mixed borders with perennials and annuals, and when I put in the vegetable garden, around 70 x 25 feet, I installed a split rail fence and then planted shrub roses around the perimeter of the fence and garden. I am going to post a bunch of pictures here of many of the roses over the years because sadly, most of them will be pulled out this spring as I work to simplify the property of the Yellow House, which I now rent out, and no one who lives there will ever appreciate the roses like I did. Or want to take care of them. And I have new roses (though not nearly as many) and several of the Yellow House roses in our new yard in Rye. I ripped out about 1/2 of them last fall when I dug up the courtyard so it could revert back to lawn. The vegetable garden and its roses will revert to lawn this spring and summer but the driveway roses will remain and many others in some mixed borders. So for my record, here is what I did starting 17 years ago.

Roses around the veggie garden - that one in the center has already bloomed, and when it does, it is fully covered in baby pink little roses - stunning!