Today was the second day of the big rose move. Yesterday, a crew of 3 came to our current house and dug up 48 roses to move up to the new rose garden. I have been working on my current garden for almost 20 years and it was very hard to watch the heart being torn out of it. I was too depressed and freaked-out to take any pictures of the roses coming out.

The crew worked all day yesterday to dig up and pack the roses for travel. This morning we loaded up two truckloads of plants and drove up to the site. We were so busy today, that I only managed to take a few pix, and here they are.

My assistant and I had previously located where each rose would go with a labeled stake in the ground. The only problem was the white section (the roses will be arranged by color), which still has the big pile of dirt sitting in it. My assistant was able to find some bare dirt to layer with cardboard and jute, so we were able to place the white roses after all.

The stakes look very disorganized now, but once we have some kind of surface on the paths, it will all begin to make sense. Also, having the arbor installed will help since the beds make rings around a central arbor circle.

From above, in front of the dining room, you get a much better idea of all the activity. Today, we placed all the roses at their stakes. Then Josh took one of his workers back to our current house for a second load, while my assistant and two other of the crew started planting the located roses.

The dirt is really in great shape under the cardboard, not clay at all. However, about a foot down, you start hitting crushed rock. The whole hill is actually a giant pile of crushed rock with a thin skin of topsoil. I believe that the grading contractor spread some dirt which had slid into the pond over this area, and it is coming in handy now, because it is much better soil and easier to work than most of our dirt. Anyway, I think the roses will be happy here.

From a way up the road, you can’t tell the roses from the workers.

I am anxious to get the arbor installed so there is something to train the climbers on. I almost called the company to come and put it in when I realized that we needed to smooth the path underneath it with a backhoe or tractor before we install the arbor, so it will have to wait until that is done before I can have it built.

I noticed that from down below on the main road, you can see a strip of the cardboard. Eventually, you will be able to see blooming roses from below. I can’t wait.

Today we located all the roses which we will be moving from my current garden on Friday. There are 48 +/-roses being moved and the stakes here represent those roses (except for a few we don’t have a place for because the big dirt pile is in the way.) There are a few roses from the area by the barn that are being planted at the same time as well, and you can see one on the left waiting for the shovel.

Each rose has a stake with a printed label on it and a number. The crew will have a list of the roses to help them locate the correct placement.

The rose garden will be arranged by color (see the map under Sources.) Although it has changed on the ground slightly from the map in the website, it is still very similar, and I will update after we plant.

The roses will be arranged in the beds, first according to color, and then according to habit (the way they grow.) For instance, I have a few standards (rose trees) which will be strategically placed in the middle of beds with low-growing roses on either side.

Also, in this shot, you see my excellent truck.

We are ready for the roses—sort of. At long last, after a year of fretting and trying to get this done, my assistant and I have gotten the ground prepared, amended, covered with cardboard, covered with jute and ready to be planted.

What you see in this picture (augmented with Photoshop to make it more visible) are the sprinkler lines to the rose beds. To see the design, click here.

This view was taken from in front of the living room. I was afraid that there would be no place where you could see the rose garden from inside the house and was resigned to that, but I am happy to discover that I will be able to see it from the living room at least.

We marked out the beds and arbor with landscape paint on the cardboard. The blue lines are for the arbor, the orange ones for the beds. The arbor will be along the pond side of the rose garden in a shallow curve. At the mid-point of the arbor, it will “T” out into the middle of the cardboard where there will be a circle of posts with a clear area inside for seating. The beds will be arranged in rings fanning out from this circle of posts.

Here you see the "neck" of the arbor expanding out into the circle of posts and some of the orange-outlined beds extending out from it.

The plan is to dig up all the roses from my current garden and move them here. We will start the process Thursday, February 28th and complete it by March 1st.

I have been trying to do this for years, but now that it is actually going to happen, I am terrified. I will be ripping the heart out of the garden I have devoted myself to for almost 20 years, and it is a scary prospect. I keep telling myself that one of the main motivations for buying this property and building the house is to have a larger space to garden and that this is just the beginning of that process, but it is still wrenching to think about.

Here we are looking straight down the neck from the main arbor toward the circle and beyond.

I have a grand plan for the rose garden, but it has been difficult to implement even the smallest steps. For instance, late last spring, I rented the largest roto-tiller available—so big, it comes on its own trailer—and it could not even make a dent in the hard soil. I had to wait until fall and have the grading contractor for the house rip up the area with his bulldozer to get it plowed. Now, I will have to wait until he comes back in the spring, or we get some other heavy equipment here, to smooth the path for the arbor before I can get that built.

Here is the main path from the circle to the north.

You may notice in these pictures that there are some weeds peeking through the cardboard. That is because the snazzy cardboard I bought in rolls is not very tough. The boxes we broke down from all the construction packing have proved much more useful and I will not buy the cardboard again, however convenient it is. In the end, we will probably have to redo some of the beds with heavier cardboard.

This is the main path from the circle heading south.

The paint markings will last for a while, but we will need something more permanent to mark the edges of the beds. I decided that I wanted to install redwood bender-board for the time being. That will not last forever, but will give me some breathing space to find a nice edging for the beds. What I would really like to find is some used brick.

I will probably plant the paths in some kind of cover crop rather than trying to surface them. I have been told that it is very frustrating to surface them because just when they are perfect, a gopher will undermine the path and all your nice surface material will sink into their tunnel and be lost.

There are also some yellow ones planted, but they bloom a little later. A few of them have jumped the gun and this one had a huge black bumblebee inside it.

I have a lot of varieties of bumblebee in the garden at my current house and they are all very unaggressive and kind of cute. Like everything here, this bee is industial-sized compared to its urban cousins, huge and black and definitely not cute.

Bumblebees are very important pollinators in a garden and should be encouraged to nest. This one is probably a female looking for a nesting spot. I have a bumblebee box at home (special nesting box) and maybe I will bring it up here for this lady or one of her sisters.

The daffs in front of the barn continue to come up and bloom. Since they were transplanted only last month, I am happy that they are doing anything at all.

These have been in the ground here for 4 or 5 years as well, but don’t seem to have naturalized much. I hope they will do better here with some softer topsoil