more roses

When we added a screened porch to our house 10 or 11 years ago (replacing a deck), I decided to make this corner into my rose garden. It gets south and west sun, so perfect for roses. Of course, since then one of the ash trees has grown so much that it now barely gets enough sun for roses, but... what're you gonna do!

I have 6 rose bushes in here and that lovely anemone peony, plus delphinium, clematis, veronica, lilies, asters, sedum, siberian iris, mountain bluet, wild geranium, mallow - and, gosh, who knows what else! This is the fountain garden and behind it I have another rose plus a hibiscus and veronica and some coreopsis. So when it all fills out, it's really pretty.

In the above photo you see Carefree Beauty on the left (back) and Nearly Wild on the right. They are nearly the same color - but Beauty is a lovely double and Nearly Wild is a single - so they play off each other fairly well. Nearly Wild will have good bloom for the rest of the summer. Beauty will have another mild flush of blooms in July and then heavy blooms from August through a killing frost. This was one of the first roses I ever bought, and I still love it.

This is J.F.Quadra - I put this in last year, so really my first year with blooms. It's looking really promising right now. It's filling out and getting taller - and has more blooms opening every day. The blooms seem to be lasting quite awhile - and they are a great deep red that softens just a little as it ages. The blooms are fairly small (at least so far), but I have a good feeling about it.

Here's another container I did - finally perking up a little! Just a ton of petunias, so nothing special - but I love these two colors together (a deep purple and a magenta). At the base of it is Johnson Blue geranium - really going to town! And to the right is a spiderwort.

When we bought this house, the woman who lived here left us a lot of stuff - kind of like anything we agreed to have left!! She left a great iron bench and two of these iron urns. They were rusty and I cleaned them up and painted them black back in 1980. But now I'm totally into the rusted iron look, so they are slowly aging into a really great look. Thanks, Dolly - I still absolutely love the urns and bench!

P.S. A THERESE BUGNET UPDATE: I stopped at the Norenberg Gardens today (fabulous place - I'll have to do a post on it soon). They had a group of Therese Bugnet roses - they were all well over 6 feet tall - maybe more like 7-8 feet tall. They were a beautiful shape - like a bouquet - skinny at the bottom and full at the top. The bottom would have been easy to underplant - and they were loaded with gorgeous blooms. This is much taller than I thought they would get - so if any of you are thinking of getting them, just wanted to let you know!!