The promise of bare briars in mud

The roses came last week! I ordered bare root stock from Pickering Nurseries - Sheridan didn't have a great selection of non-hybrid teas, and this way I got to choose almost exactly what I wanted. (Almost. I started looking in earnest around the beginning of the month, and they were already sold out of the more popular varieties.)

The initial plan called for a mixture of peonies and ground cover shrub roses, but after realizing that perhaps I would really prefer blooms for more than two weeks a year - gorgeous as they are - I decided to excise the peonies in favor of more roses.

Also, I may or may not have fallen in love with some wildly inappropriate cultivars (but isn't that always the way?) and needed the room. There will still be a border of 'The Fairy' roses - dwarf polyanthas - that are easygoing ( as roses go), and bloom continuously. In the corner near the door, a David Austin variety, 'Graham Thomas,' a yellow English rose. It grows to five feet, which is a bit excessive, but I couldn't resist. (I had already had to give up my dream of one or two 'New Dawn' climbers, there being nothing for them to climb in the front garden.)

(One thing that I did not realize, and which seems a bit obvious in the picture above, is that 'The Fairy' is super thorny. Since I may or may not be slightly allergic to rose thorns ... this will be Interesting.)

The third and final variety is a tiny shrub rose called 'Amber Sun,' a reasonable recent variety with a slightly silly name, but lovely flowers. Supposedly they are pale pink with an orange overlay, and the flowers fade back to pink. (This garden has a definite theme of pink and purple right now ... I am just going to go with it.)

So we planted these last weekend - not nearly soon enough, as they were obviously coming out of dormancy already. It's looking good so far - we've kept them mounded, as recommended, and I noticed today that shoots are already starting to appear.

Speaking of shoots: the peonies are not entirely gone from the plan. Remember the two peony plants last year that didn't take? I had assumed they had died - one definitely did; it had some kind of root rot - and the other sent up leaves, but was stunted and never came to anything.

Well, it's back, weirdly and unexpectedly (and smack in the middle of the rose garden, of course.) it is still super small - I see peonies in other gardens and they are so much taller before they lose their waxy red color and leaf out. But perhaps that is merely an age thing. I have made some space for it (and it now has the advantage of being near the roses, where I have heavily amended the soil with Good Things), and we shall see what happens.

This weekend: hopefully back garden clean up - it's far past time to prune the rugosas - and possibly restarting the herb pot. I've been waiting for it to be definitively frost free; they do better when I leave them outside for the season. (And yes, this means that I had definitively given up on the herb pot, Mark I. It became something of a very sad, very lost, cause.)