Here is the climber I bought at Hearst Castle. It is called Claire Jacquier. In the garden at Hearst Castle, they have this rose wrapped around a tall palm tree to about twelve feet, which looks wonderful. They use various small-flowered climbers on all the palm trees—another one is Cecile Brunner. I can’t remember seeing this done anywhere else, but can’t figure out why since it looks so good. My rose will just go on the arbor since I am not putting in any palm trees.

At the rose symposium at Hearst Castle, there was an excellent lecture on structures for roses and rose topiary. I plan to add a lot of arches across the paths for additional climbers once I run out of space on the arbor.

The roses still up in the tubs by the barn are waiting for the arbor to be built. Most of them will make new homes climbing on the arbor although a few of them are possibly scheduled for the veranda when the house is finished.

I am not sure about having roses on the house, since I understand that they are flammable and firescaping is pretty important in our area. We will see.

Chinensis Mutabilis is going gang-busters also. This rose can either be a big bush or a small (relatively) climber. I am not sure where I will put it, I may use it as a ground filler on the east side of the arbor facing the pond. I wonder if it will bloom all the time here like it does in my current garden.

Another possibility is to plant it as a climber with yellow honeysuckle like I used to have it in my current garden. That was quite lovely because the honeysuckle complimented the roses so well.

Here is another shot of our miracle rose, now starting to bloom. You can see its little cast at the bottom of the photo. We now have two posts for it and it is strapped in tight so it can’t move at all. It never ceases to amaze me how this rose survived. I didn’t take a picture of the broken trunk, but believe me, it was broken through.

I guess I have to take back all the mean things I said about this rose when it was in my old garden. It seemed like such a sniveler, but look how tough it has turned out to be. Maybe it will be cured of rust here too. (This is probably too much to hope for.)

It was quite windy this afternoon—as it often is in the afternoon—and the new sycamores were getting blown hard. These two are the ones to the north of the pond and they are less protected than the rest.

I decided that it is a good thing that I intend to pollard them because if I left them natural, these would have a different shape from the others because of the almost constant wind where they are.

We have adjusted the placement of the arbor at the south end (to the left in this photo). It now will join up with the path on the next ring down that I had previously planned. Extending it this way will require that we incorporate a hose bib into the design of the arbor, but I think it will work without too much trouble.

When I first saw shot on my computer, I suddenly realized that once the arbor is complete, we won’t be able to see the whole design of the garden from this angle anymore. I guess we will have to be contented with an arbor covered with blooming climbing roses instead.

Our miracle rose! On April 16th, I arrived to find this rose lying on the ground with a broken trunk. Since the foliage wasn’t limp, we decided to tie it back up and put a cast on it. Amazingly, it looks fine!

What we did is wrap soft cardboard around the trunk and then a heavier piece around that, securing it all with blue tape—since that was all we had with us. We then put water into the tube from the top to keep the cambium moist. Astonishingly, it seemed to work. The rose doesn’t seem to have skipped a beat and all the buds are still swelling to bloom.

This rose is called Playboy, but I am changing its name to Lazarus if it survives.

Here is a rose I have had for a long time—perhaps my oldest one. It is Peace and was given to me by my husband after we had a fight. I did not have a garden when I got this rose and it did not get watered all that regularly, but managed to survive.

Once I began gardening in earnest, I transplanted Peace to a better spot where it was on an irrigation system. However over the years, the trees grew up and the last couple of years it hardly got any sun at all.

Finally, this poor, beleaguered rose is going to come into its own. This year’s first flower is magnificent, much fuller than anything it has ever produced before. It is also leafing out with enthusiasm. Hopefully, it will get a new lease of life in this new garden.

This is a climber called Cocktail, which, coincidently comes from the same rose breeder as Peace, a company in France called Meiland. It is a gorgeous rose. This one and its mate across the path I took as cuttings from the one I have in my current garden, which is too large and too happy to move.

It blooms all the time and this time of year is so covered with blooms that people don’t realize it is a rose—most think it bougainvillea. The snazzy yellow eye fades with age, but even then, it is still pretty.

I have at five roses from Meiland—Peace, Cocktail, Polka, Pierre de Ronsard (possibly my favorite rose) and White Meiland—all purchased before I knew that they came from the same company. Evidently, they produce styles of roses that I really respond to. I know many people in heritage rose groups seem to disdain this company, but I love their roses.

Working on Saturday, my assistant and a helper finished more of the stairs since last week. When the arbor goes in, it will have an opening directly at the top of the stairs and the neck of the arbor will extend out the other side to the circle in the middle of the garden.

The two poles you see in this picture are temporary supports for the two climbers which will be on the far west side of the arbor circle. Once the arbor is complete, the roses will be tied to it and the poles removed.

From the top of the stairs looking west, we again see the two temporary support poles on the other side of the center circle.

I am still having angst about the surface for the paths but have pretty much come down on the idea of road-base gravel. It will compact hard and solidify somewhat. Eventually, if that surface is successful, I can get some more glamorous gravel to put on top of it.

Sadly, I think we have lost this rose standard. It is Playboy and was quite a whiner in its old home at my current house, but had taken to this garden with gusto, leafing and budding mightily.

Unfortunately, Sunday and Monday were very windy. What seems to have happened, was that the tree swaying back and forth in the wind caused the strap to the support pole to slide down the trunk. Then a strong gust blew the tree down, breaking the trunk.

I don’t see how it can survive with such a break in the trunk, but it was still not droopy this morning, so we put a “cast” on the trunk and re-strapped it (more securely) to the pole. If it is still ok by next week, I know it will survive, but I do not hold out much hope.

Luckily, I did not have this rose too long, so replacing it will not break my heart as it would if I lost some of my older roses.

We have made a temporary support for these two climbers while they are in the tubs. Eventually, they will be planted on the arbor, and the shrub roses in the other tubs will be planted on the bank below it facing the pond. For now, I wanted to keep that area clear for ease of construction—hence the tubs—but when it is complete, these tubs will be removed.

I may use tubs throughout the garden later to raise some roses up from the beds to add height—or may take them up to the future vegetable garden for strawberries or who knows . . .

You can always find a use for barrels.

I took this picture of the bay tree from in front of the dining room. You can’t really see it well in this picture, but there is a happy little bed of poison oak around the base of it which we have got to remove. It is now starting to climb into the tree—a bad thing.

The logistics of how to do this have taken a little while to work out. My assistant tells me that taking it out is easiest if you start very early in the morning while it is cold. I will get some large, paper, green-waste disposal bags from a hardware store near where I currently live. These bags are about 4' tall and hold maybe 1/2 a yard of material if packed tight. We will put the cuttings in them and throw them into the brush past the leech field to decompose. My assistant has volunteered to do this—with my heartfelt thanks.

Here is the current state of the rose garden with the stairs partially complete. Notice the newly cardboarded area at the north end. My assistant moved the huge pile of soil out of the way as well. That is 7 yards of soil—and a pick-up truck holds about 1 yard. What a lot of work!

We now have to mark in the beds without the ability to anchor a line in the center of the circle because of the planted roses. I am hoping that we can get a line across at a few places for anchor points and then will be able to fudge in the rest. I am very excited because it is starting to look like something now. Soon I will have a real garden!

All my roses are leafing out excellently except one which was sick before we transplanted it.

Here you can see how healthy they look. We have put straw mulch around the base of the roses to keep the moisture in the soil. This will be much more important later in the year as it gets hotter.

My assistant has cleaned out all the weeds. We tried spraying them with vinegar, but they had gotten too established. Vinegar only seems to work on the baby weeds.

He had to hand-pull all the weeds, and it was a lot of work too. This has decided me against using a grass surface on the paths. I would have to irrigate to keep the grass up and the weeds would just take over. I need to measure my path space and figure out how much gravel I would need to cover them.

Healthy roses in the early morning sun.

I have about 32 miniature roses rescued from a nursery garbage heap to be planted soon. These are roses that are planted 4 or 5 to a tiny pot and forced to bloom. Once the blooms are spent, no one will buy them, which is just a shame, because you can separate and transplant them and they will turn into some nice plants. I have my first four still, one is in the bed in this picture and 3 are still in the old garden at my current house. They produce lovely flowers. Because these new miniatures are the same color, I will plant them as a hedge on the edge of a bed to make a foreground for taller roses.

El Camino Real! My assistant got a friend to help smooth the path for the arbor. They only took one day to make it! Next, we will build stairs down to the pond.

I am thinking I will ask the carpenter my brother uses to bid on this arbor. I have a bid from the fence company, but want to get a price from him before I go forward.

Sunset, April 9, 2008.

The sun sets so much further north now than it did in midwinter. It is going down almost around the flank of the hill instead of to the west. I only got this picture because we were spending the night at the cottage. Jim cooked hamburgers on an outdoor grill since the oven on the stove is still a little hinky.

This was a very quiet week at the site. On Friday, only my assistant and I were there.

Here is a picture of a rose my mother calls “Gold of Ophir.” Another name for it is Fortune’s Double Yellow, named after the British lord who brought it back from China. I am not sure this is the correct identification, but for now, that is good enough.

My mother got this rose as a cutting from her neighbor in Pope Valley and made me a cutting from her plant. It is quite a vigorous and thorny climber. The deer won’t eat it at my mother’s because of the stickers. This rose looks quite pink, but it has an orangey cast when in full bloom. It is a once bloomer but like all once bloomers, puts on quite a show.

This rose has an anomaly—another rose growing out of the middle of it. I have some large flowered miniatures that do this fairly often, it seems to be brought on by rain. There is a name for this anomaly, but when I looked it up, I couldn’t find the reference—of course.

If you look closely, you will be able to see the rose planted against the middle post of this three-post section of fence. It is Cecile Brunner, also known as the Sweetheart Rose, and is a huge climber. The one in my back yard now (which I did not move) is twenty feet wide—and that with a lot of pruning to keep it in check. Eventually, I expect this rose to completely cover this wood-framed section of the fence.

It has pale pink flowers and blooms once in the late spring. There is a lot of dispute over whether Cecile Brunner is a once bloomer or a repeat flowering rose. In my experience, the climber is once blooming and the bush is repeat flowering.

My assistant has whacked the weeds around the rose garden. Last year, I bought the Mercedes-Benz of weed whackers (a Husqvarna). My assistant was able to get so much more done using it that it pretty much paid for itself in a week.

I hope that when the slightly curved main path won’t just look like a mistake when we are done. It has the slight curve to echo the future arbor.

The pomegranate and dogwood which were moved up during the great rose move are showing signs of life. The poor pomegranate is on its second move, since I got it from a friend who had to move and couldn’t take it to her new place. It should be much happier here where it will get hotter sun than in its old place.

I will plant the dogwood, but after it blooms. I am not sure where I want to put it yet.

That other thing in the tub on the left is another Pierre de Ronsard rose—one of my favorites. I have to leave my old one behind, since it is too big to move, so made several cuttings, all of which are doing well.