Megan's Gift Multiplies

Just before Christmas, Megan came into my office with a cheerful glow on her face and a red and white striped miniature rose in her hand.  Megan said, "Merry Christmas!" as she offered me this rose she had picked up at the store knowing that I loved roses.  It was such a sweet gesture from the housekeeper of the church to me as the pastor.  I put it in the widow of my office and enjoyed every bloom it gave, but by the end of January it had stopped blooming so I brought it home to get it ready for its next phase of life.

What most people don't know is that the pretty miniature rose you buy at the store is usually three or four plants of the same rose growing in one pot.  The nursery packs them in tight to give the biggest display in the quickest time possible.  They often call them "Party Roses" knowing that they will make a nice show for a week or two and then the rose usually dies from neglect.   If you look close you can see that the branches do not originate from a common source but there are four plants crammed into a very small pot. 

The roots have grown so that they are tangled together, but if you gently work them apart you can separate the plants until you have (in this case) four separate plants ready to be potted up and given a life of their own.  There will often be some of the roots that break off, but if you are careful you can save most of them and reduce the amount of shock the roses experience.

Now they are ready to pot up, let their roots grow out and get ready to plant in the rose bed in a month or so.  Individually each rose will become a strong plant.  I bought this handy set of plantable pots for the next phase of their lives.  I will transplant each of these in about a month so these pots should be perfect. 

While I was at it I did some work with my roses from Chamblee's.  Did you know that when nurseries propagate plants they take several cuttings and put them in the same pot.  They do this so that if one or two of the new starts do not begin to root they will in all likelihood have at least one that makes it.  My own experience with propagating roses from cuttings is that almost half of them will die with over half making new plants.  Some varieties are so vigorous you can hardly miss, while others can be very difficult to get started.  This means that it is very common that you will have multiple plants in each pot. 

In my order of Purple Rain there were actually four plants.  In Shreveport there were three plants, Glamis Castle had three, Dolly Parton had two, Sachet had two, and Rise N Shine had two.  Only Green Ice and Twilight Zone were single plants.   Once I went through all the new pots, we went from what looked like 10 roses to 23 separated and potted up.  What a fun way to multiply your roses.  Now I have more roses I can plant, and I can share many of them as well.

Just Can't Pass Chamblee's When You Are In East Texas

Angie and I made a bittersweet trip to Shreveport recently.  Her father's house is about to be sold and we needed to finish removing many of the personal items.  It was good to see Angie's brother and family but hard to work though another layer of grief after Clyde's death.  With a truck full of personal items we started our way back to Oklahoma knowing we would pass through Tyler, Texas.  I don't think it is possible for me to drive through Tyler without stopping at Chamblee's Rose Nursery, but with so little room I thought about not stopping.  As you would imagine my green thumb turned the steering wheel, and I found myself pulling into the familiar parking lot.

We are still in early February, so even greenhouse roses in Texas are just now coming out of dormancy.  A good thing as it will be another month before I will want to plant roses with new growth here in Oklahoma.  Even so, it was nice to see a few rose blooms as we walked our way through the two greenhouses they have open to the public.  The many other greenhouses have roses growing in various stages of getting ready for the market. 

This would be a good time to point out the three reasons I like to get roses from Chamblee's. 1. They grow roses that grow well in my area and they are actively working with the Earth Kind Roses program to provide roses to the public which will be healthy and vigorous plants through out their lives.  2. Chamblee's provides roses grown on their own roots rather than grafted to another rose's rootstock.  I believe this provides better plants for the long run.  3. They provide nice sized healthy plants at a very good price.  At $8.95 or $11.95 for one gallon plants, I spent just over $80 and left there with 8 plants.  They do provide 3 gallon plants which are much bigger, but I'm too cheap for that.

I could have easily bought many more, but it was hard enough finding room in the truck for the 8 I did buy.  They have so many varieties I would like to grow, and the plants look so healthy it took a great deal of restraint to stop when I did.  If there is anyway you can manage it, I think you should try to make the drive to Tyler, Texas this spring to visit Chamblee's and to visit the Tyler Rose Garden.  They are must see places for the Rosarian.  For that matter, add visiting the American Rose Society Garden in Louisiana just an hour down the road as well.

The roses I came home with show my unique and varied taste in roses.  The first three are miniatures: Rise N Shine, Green Ice, and Sachet.  I have had Green Ice before, but I think it did not survive the move.  Rise N Shine is a very healthy yellow mini which I have not grow before.  Sachet is a mauve/lavender miniature that has been around since 1985.  The next two are sentimental picks Shreveport, whose orange blended color I enjoy and it will remind us of Clyde since he so enjoyed living in Shreveport. This year I am also adding a hybrid tea, which is something I have not done in a long time. Dolly Parton, is a hybrid tea whose fragrant and very large blossoms are something I have always been drawn to but have never grown before.  With Shreveport and Dolly both sporting orange, I think I will put them on either side of the gate to the backyard and then flanked by the next roses.  These roses are less upright, shrub roses that follow my love of purple/lavender roses and are Purple Rain and Twilight Zone.  The orange and purple together may be too much, but it will be away from most of my other roses.  I also added a David Austin rose I have not grown before Glamis Castle.  I have not had good success with his white roses, but many people say that Glamis Castle is the best of these. I just want to give it another try, so here we go with Glamis Castle.  

With the 22 roses I recently moved here, that puts us at 30 roses that will be brand new to our yard.  This 30 does not include a couple I have ordered and will tell you about later, or the rose I was given by a beautiful young woman in our church or the seeding I found growing in my mother's garden.  As I started moving the roses I noticed what was clearly a young rose sprouting up underneath the red miniature moss rose Unconditional Love. I will tell you much more about these as the season comes on, but for now, take a visit to Chamblee's Rose Nursery either on-line or in person.  You will be glad you did. 

Moving Day Finally Came

Martin Luther King Jr. weekend gave me the perfect weather and amount of time to return to rose gardening.  It is hard to believe, but it was a year and a half ago when Angie and I moved to Chickasha.  At that time we had moved roughly 30 roses to my mother's for a temporary stay while we made the move.  Now we have finally moved the roses that have survived to our new home.  It seems that seven of the roses died in the process leaving us with 24 new roses, which I planted this past weekend.  I didn't mark the roses so many remain unidentified, but I was surprised how many I could recognize from their bare canes or remember the location they were planted in.  The rest will surprise us this spring and I will try to move them to more appropriate spaces once they show their true colors.

Heritage recently relocated to its new home.  I know its only January but I am really looking forward to spring. 

The delay, which allowed my mother to enjoy the roses a little longer than expected, was brought about by the large amount of work needing to be done at the new church, our associate pastor leaving six months after we arrived, and showing our Italian Greyhounds this fall.  There is a nice picture of Skidi's Pretty Boy Floyd and me at the bottom of this post.  Now that they are here, I am glad to note how healthy and strong most of them look.  It looks like I just planted the best shipment of bare root roses I have ever seen.  That all of these first arrived as very small rooted cuttings makes their arrival as huge bare root roses somewhat ironic. 

            Moved & Identified

Abraham Darby

Golden Celebration
Heritage

Jude The Obscure

St. Swithun  
Tradescant
William Shakespeare 2000
Oklahoma
Red Cascade
Unconditional Love
DayDream
Distant Drums
Folksinger
Prairie Harvest

            10 of 17 Moved but Not Identified the remainder didn't make it

Fair Bianca

Carlin’s Rhythm
Pam's Choice

Jeri Jennings

Penelope

Maggie

Moore’s Striped Rugosa

Lavender Crystal

Popcorn

Tattooed Lady
Winsome  
Twister    
Mel Hulse
Treasure Trail 
Belinda’s Dream  
Rhapsody in Blue
Siren’s Keep

Settling In

With the move to the new church, Epworth United Methodist Church, and new home a couple of months under the belt, this past week and a half has given me the first real time to do much work in our new yard.  This also gives me a chance to update my blog which has been neglected this summer.  Yet before I show you the landscape, let me share one of my other hobbies with you, my 62 VW Karmann Ghia.  This picture shows the car beside our new home.  They look like they belong in the Italian country side.

It is hard to believe that when we started working on this car a little less than 10 years ago, it had been sitting in the pasture for years as a chicken coupe.  I just love this picture of the ghia.

Now to the work at hand.  We are a long way from putting in new roses.  That will get started in September.  For now I have been cleaning out some of the overgrowth in the yard.  This Friday we began chipping branches from the dozen 3-6" round trees that had grown up in fence lines and flowerbeds while also trimming up some of the bushes and lower limbs on the trees in front.  Thomas, my happy helper, is feeling triumphant in his work.  The two small trees behind him stayed keeping the total number of trees on the lot at a dozen while still bringing in some needed sunlight. 

After referencing the manual, we were ready to get busy chipping.

A chipper is a great way to get rid unwanted trimmings while also providing good matter for a compost pile.  You should really know that it can be a real workout.

After all was said and done, we ended up with a nice start to the compost pile which will provide a nice soil amendment for the flowerbeds in the spring.  When some lawn clippings and other yard waste is worked in as well, it should really start cooking.  For now it is about 8' x 8' and 2' tall.  Angie was a big help in this project, but she is unseen as she was the photographer. 

Now that the yard is looking better and the beds are shaping up, I can start figuring out what I will move and where roses will go.  This summer has been so very busy with the new church.  It has been great but I have missed the physical exertion and pleasure of being in the yard.  While exhausting, it is also refreshing.  I don't know who said it, but I have always been fond of the saying, "When the body is most in motion the mind is most at ease."  That being said, I think I'm ready for a nap on this Sunday afternoon with my body, mind and spirit each feeling at ease.

Mature Bushes

While I am as much a fan of new roses as the next person, I love to see big, mature, old rose bushes.  Mature roses offer so much that their younger siblings can not.  A young bush can not overwhelm you with thousands of blooms.  A young rose is more susceptible to draught lacking the developed root system of a mature bush.  And while we all love to see new basel breaks sending out strong new shoots of growth, it is the strong woody growth that can support the explosive displays of spring.

This old growth wood often looks very different from the green wood of new growth.  As this older wood continues to build rings of growth just like a tree, its outer skin breaks with the expansion and develops bark while looses its thorns and looks like what we often think of as a tree.  You can see this on my mother's mature plant of Buff Beauty.  Without support Buff Beauty becomes a broad spreading plant but with support it easily grows as a climber.  Pictured here is Buff Beauty after the arch it had grown on for over a decade had fallen and after it had lost almost half its growth from the collapse.

The canopy created by this mature bush of the Hybrid Musk, Buff Beauty is breathtaking to sit under when in full bloom.  If it were not for the strong, older, mature growth underneath it could never reach these heights.  New breaks of growth will develop at the top of such mature wood while the lower portions will seem rather bare even loosing its thorns.  Sitting here, under the filtered light and overwhelmed by its heavy fragrance one can become lost to the world.

This final shot serves as the backdrop for my blog.  I love its heavy wood and light flowers.  I thing we have done a disservice to would be rose growers when they have been told for years to trim their roses back in the spring.  Too often they trim them back and miss the real beauty these bushes can give.  One of the first pieces of advice I often give an aspiring rose grower is to stop trimming their roses and let them grow out to their nature size.  Too often we have tried to work against the nature of these beautiful roses to their detriment and our own. 

Cut Back and Dig Up!

When I first started ordering roses, I would order them as bare-root plants that came in the early spring as plants that were cut back to about nine inches tall and a healthy root system on the other end.  As I prepared my roses to make this migrant journey, I thought of those boxes of roses I would eagerly open each spring imagining their coming blooms.  Now the roses I order come as much smaller plants in small containers of soil, but the roses I am preparing to move are going to follow the bare root images in my mind from years gone by.  I worked through the garden selecting the roses that will make the move and those that will stay to make a manageable garden for the new resident.

As I decided that a rose would move, I cut it back the week before it was to be dug up hoping this would give it some time to adjust to the idea.  I picked my day of spring break, got up early and I dug up thirty roses.  When I trimmed them, I had carefully gone through each plant deciding just how far back it was to be cut off.  I was trimming them back farther than I really like, but as I was digging them up I realized that I had not cut them back nearly enough to make their transportation easy.  The first roses I dug up were probably two feet tall above the ground.  Those first roses with their generous size were packed and loaded, but quickly I began making a second cut to about a foot tall as they were loaded up.

Notice the sucker being sent out from the roots.  This will expand the size of the plant when it emerges.

As I was planting them in my mother's garden, I saw just how clearly from one end of the row to the other they decreased in size.  For convenience I dug one long trench and placed them side by side far too close for my comfort and certainly their's if they were to stay long.  After years of hearing me say, "I would rather plant a two dollar bush in a ten dollar hole than a ten dollar bush in a two dollar hole," my mother mockingly asked me if that was a ten dollar hole as she brought me a glass of water to quench my thirst.  Knowing that I was borrowing her garden space, I politely smiled.  Certainly the soil qualified but it was not my best effort.

          The list of the roses that made the move:
Distant Drums
Prairie Star
Folksinger
Heritage
Jude The Obscure
St. Swithun
Tradescant
William Shakespeare 2000
Fair Bianca
Golden Celebration
Maggie
Jeri Jennings
Penelope
Oklahoma
Winsome
Lavender Crystal
Tattooed Lady
Popcorn
Twister
Red Cascade
Treasure Trail
Unconditional Love
Mel Hulse
Belinda's Dream
Siren's Keep
Rhapsody In Blue
Pam's Choice
DayDream 
Carlin's Rhythm
Moore's Striped Rugosa

          Small plants potted up and ready to move on day one.
Autumn Splendor
Abraham Darby
Linda Campbell
Vineyard Song
Lavender Lassie 

        To be Cut Back and Moved after the Spring Bloom
Climbing Rainbow's End
Red Moss Rambler

Only a rose nut would even consider this much work.

Visiting Home

In my last post I shared that in June we will be moving to serve a new church and community.  In the United Methodist Church, pastors (or parsons) live in parsonages provided by the church.  So last week we visited the new church and what will be our new home.  I want to thank fellow blogger and current resident, Elizabeth Johnson of Wind and Honey Creations for sending us this lovely picture of the home before we arrived.  Elizabeth and her husband Rev. Rockford Johnson, whom I will be following at Epworth United Methodist Church in Chickasha Oklahoma, graciously welcomed us in and gave us a tour of this 1919 construction parsonage.  I'm sure that over the coming year you will get to know much more about  this house.

The church has maintained the parsonage very well.  While I certainly wanted to learn about the home, my mind was also thinking about potential rose gardens.  Arriving early I drove by and shot this picture which shows the house, garage and so much space for roses.  Yet before I can do too much dreaming, there are many administrative tasks to wrap up, sermons to prepare, a home and office to pack up, and hardest of all many goodbyes to say.  Now is the time of living in between.