Geeze, it HAS been a while since I've messed with this web page. Plan to add more pictures soon. Yeah, I know, you've heard that before. Just got back from a third trip to Germany in a year. Oma is doing OK. Could be better. I will put up pictures of my hometown soon. Meantime, it has a Web Page: Gelnhausen.net. It does look just as amazing as the pictures in the web page.
My garden is going nuts this year. It is the best that it has been since I've started it. After a long wait, Alchemist is in full bore bloom. He is just show-stopping. If there is one thing I can urge new rose growers to do, it is to exercise patience. The shrubs get better with age, and the climbers litterally take a few years to really begin to take off. Patience will be amply rewarded, I promise.
In my last message I said I bought Rio Samba. Well, let me tell you about that gaudy rose. I love it. I usually hate orange roses on principle, but Rio Samba is one of the toughest roses in the garden, and that is saying a lot with a garden full of OGRs! It suffered NO winter dieback, and was the first hybrid tea to bloom. Last year it got no diseases and had no trouble with the summer heat. I was gone a lot, so it got pretty neglected, as well. It and Elina are the two best hybrid teas I have. Crystaline, a white hybrid tea, however is a dog. It never grew much last year, and died back to two spindly canes in winter. The flowers were nothing spectacular, either. If any of you have a good white hybrid tea that can stand 100 degree temps in summer, let me know. Crystaline is not one of them.
Just got back from a garden shopping trip. Bought six new roses: Peace, Chicago Peace, Rio Samba (for Michael), Mother's Day, English Garden, and Perdita. I also bought an entire flat of 60 viola plants, plus a flat of 18 pansies. Pansies, violas, violets, and other plants in that family are a childhood favorite of mine. I alawys remember the big brown faces on the bronze, yellow, and purple pansies. The ones I buy now are usually faceless, like the Antique Shades, but I always throw in a face or two for old times sake.
Later... I dug the three holes for the hybrid teas, dug out The Squire,
which has some bad virus problems, and planted English Garden. It is going
in next to Abraham Darby, The Dark Lady, and Comte de Chambord. I need
to move CdC to that area. Right now it is being dwarfed by Therese Bugnet,
Mme. Plantier, and Kazanlik. I had NO blooms out of Kazanlik last year
because of a late freeze. This year it is covered with buds. I need to prune
out some dead wood before he gets too much bigger. He's a thorny SOB.
April 4, 1997 -
April showers bring May flowers? I hope so. I may not be online for long today, it's beginning to rumble out there. Wanted to put in this link, Nasa's beautiful pictures of the comet Hale-Bopp.
Went flower shopping yesterday. Bought two Austin roses, The Prince, a deep purple, and The Reeve, which is medium pink with cupped flowers. They also had English Garden, Perdita, and Evelyn. I also bought a red foliaged Viola odorata, some deep blue lobelia, and a few herbs. Ah, and I also found some deep blue/purple Salvia greggi. If any of you garden in hot climates, this is a must for you. It continues to bloom all summer long, with a really big bloom flush in spring and fall. It comes in all shades of pink and coral to red, white, and now the purple. Goes great with old roses. Think I'd better shut down now, or the lightning might do it for me. Til later.
Well, instead of gardening in the last two days, I've been working on the web page. It now has rose and garden links from hell! If you seen any mistakes, or have some more links to add, send me some e-mail. I would especially like to have more rose links, especially rose nurserys.
I did get a bit of gardening done in between cussing html. I weeded and mulched the porch bed, tied up some of the climbers (ouch...), and bought more mulch. Found a heck of a deal at Home Depot. Three cubic feet of pine bark mulch for $1.95 a bag. I bought eight bags. I need to go spread some more. It's also time for me to lay down ferilizer. I think I"ll do that this afternoon. My legs are still sore from bending and weeding, but laying ferilizer won't strain me too much! :) It's supposed to rain, but so far only clouds. Been watering, since it's been so windy and the ground is dry, dry, dry.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. It's been a while, again. Just expect this. At any rate, I wanted to share something with you. I was browsing the web yesterday, and I stumbled upon the web page of my home town. I know that Germany is a very technologically hip country, and I know they are on the cutting edge, but somehow, I never figured that the small medieval town that I was born in would have a homepage. It does, and you can find it at http://www.gelnhausen.net. Check it out, you will see where I originated.
As far as how the garden is doing, my perennial violets, Viola odorata, are blooming and looking cute. It will take a while before they cover the bed in front of the porch. All of my roses are leafing out, and there are a few buds here and there. Mostly on Old Blush, Climbing Old Blush, Therese Bugnet, and on The Herbalist. I may have lost Chinatown, a Hybrid Tea that was sent to me as a cutting. I don't think it made it through the winter. Celene Forestier also bit it this winter. Ah well, room for a different plant!
So it's been a while since I wrote anything here. Summer happens. You saw that there are several new buttons on my homepage. The only one that works is the Other Gardens, Other Places button. It has a few pictures of the gardens I've visited. As soon as I can find the pack of pictures, I'll add my infamous shots of the mushroom from hell...
Ok, ok, time to finally write something here. I'll be adding new posts to the top of this file, rather than at the bottom, so if you visit, you don't have to scroll down to find out if something new has been added or not. In the garden, everything is growing like gangbusters, thanks to four days of gentle rain, about 4 inches all told. Of course, that means the weeds are worse as well. I'm glad I can carefully crop my pictures, then you don't see that fact that the roses are sometime sitting in a bed of weedy Bermuda grass.
A lot of my roses have put on new growth, especially my own-roots from Heirloom Old Garden Roses. I just found out yesterday that a local nursery carries roses from Heirloom. Need to go check them out!
Belle Story now has six or seven canes, each topped with a few buds as well. The Herbalist is growing, too, but no buds yet. A tiny own-root plant of Evelyn has a flower at the tip of it. It DOES smell like fresh peaches, as people have described. With all the new rose and weed growth, it's starting to look very jungly out there. Graham Thomas is on his third bloom cycle this year. Many people have called him stingy. So far, he's been nothing but generous for me. I must be living right.
I'd like to thank everyone that has sent me complements on my web page. I am very glad ya'll enjoy it. Hopefully, I'll have some time (and inclination) to add more sections and pictures soon!
Susan