There IS a garden here!

Roses in Paradise

Yesterday was our first spring day. We could sprawl in the afternoon shade and enjoy blissful balmy weather. It is only days ago, that these metal chairs struck chill into the bones, and we had to retreat inside away from a nasty, chilly breeze.

The WILDLIFE gardening keeps coming, but there is also a garden here. Just finished pruning 26 roses in the Paradise Garden. Only the second time I have pruned them. Still learning here. But the man is right. The man is Ludwig of Ludwig’s Roses www.ludwigsroses.co.za Take your courage firmly in your secateurs, and approach a rose which towers over your head, like Tropical Sunset. Cut it down to hip height. Hurts, right? But it is almost frightening to see, he is right, within weeks, there are flowers above your head again!

I have four colour schemes: pale, dark, gold, and pink in-Persian-garden

When we started the rose garden, there was nothing, except one VERY pissed off gardener hacking out lumps of concrete, and thinking fondly of @##@$@#$ builders and their workers, and how they treat plants and topsoil. Right. So I took my trusty little hand rake, solid aluminium, and worked my way, in stripes across each of the four quarters. If I hit a lump and it sings, it is concrete, into the bucket it goes, onto the heap of shame and revenge. If all resistance crumbles when I hit the lump, it is clay, and it stays, because roses like clay, it is fertile, (and soggy see 22^nd August)

In September 2007 we planted the rose garden. The Ungardener did the roses, and trees, and shrubs. I did all the herbaceous perennial fillers, and groundcover cuttings, and where the Ungardener said “There’s a hole there!”

Roses are at their best in October, so here is our rose garden in its very first “full” flush last year. Now two of my four trees have read their instruction book. “When I grow up I’ll be a parasol” and throw dappled shade, so the roses don’t cook in hours. The shrubby things and fillers have filled out with a vengeance, and some have had to be moved on. I had no idea you would get that big! The groundcovers billow over the path and get cut back and spread around. The colours I see in my mind are slowly appearing in the garden, but can always be tweaked and adjusted. A garden is never perfect. Never complete. Never “finished”.

We already have nice fat buds on Peace, so I am looking forward to the effect this October! Prunus nigra has buds coming too. Last year they were open for the 1^st of September. Spring!