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The Garden—May 2008
May 30, 2008  

This picture is actually from the 28th. It is one of my peach hybrid tea roses that is lovin’ life in its new home.

These roses have a completely different habit this year than they had in the past and they have been in my old garden for at least 10 years.This year, they are very compact and leafy. They did not grow out from their prune-back too much, but just put out a little new wood and started to bloom.

I am not sure if this will hold true next year once they are established. Since these are old friends, cherished for their beautiful flowers, I am thrilled that they are doing so well.

We have made some decisions on changing the arbor and Joseph has started working on them. Looking back at the photos, the arbor looked much better in the photos than in real life, but even then, the circle did not register as the center of the garden.
Joseph detached the “neck” from the main wing of the arbor. The two uprights between the main wing and the circle will now become independent arches, rather than being connected together.
We are also going to add some more superstructure to the section at the top of the stairs to give it more importance, and do the same with the circle arches.

You can’t see the circle in the middle from here that well, but we are going to put cross-pieces on the arches over the four paths. We also are going to make arches over the middle of the circle with rebar. The rebar will be hooked to each corner post and arch up over the center of the circle to another post on the other side. Hopefully, the arches will form a pinwheel pattern above the circle.

They probably won’t show from this view until the roses are more mature. Once the climbers get long enough, I will train canes along the rebar arches and there will be arches of roses over the central circle.

Meanwhile, I have been very worried about my beautiful Valley Oaks. I have drawn arrows on the photo so you can see the trees since they are kind of hard to distinguish in all the weeds. 3 of them had leafed out early and were doing fine, but the other 2 were slower and got caught in the 1-2 punch of the week with the freezing temperatures followed by the week with the 100° heat. The slower two oaks had tender, light green leaves that just fried.

In this picture, you can see two that did OK and one that got pretty toasted. There is another one which is not in the picture (see May 21, for a photo), that has no leaves on it at all. My assistant hiked down through the weeds and ticks and reported that the tree actually has buds for new leaves on it and we hope it will survive. I have to admit, I teared up a bit when I heard the good news. These trees are on irrigation, but they are going to have a hell of a first year here with this drought.

This is the rose in the tub in front of the cottage which we planted in great haste right before my birthday party last summer. It is very happy there and doesn’t seem to be hating the tub (as some of the roses in the past have). Perhaps this is because it is getting more regular maintenance than they did when we weren’t up here so much.
May 28, 2008  
I found this wasps’ nest inside a pot laying up by the barn. I don’t think it is still inhabited, but did not test my theory.

I haven’t taken any close up pictures of the roses on the fence because of the weeds, which could harbor ticks. These are the roses that we planted last summer, and they are just going gang-busters, blooming and blooming and blooming some more. It has been an amazing spring for roses. Everywhere I go, they all look spectacular. We will certainly pay in dry July and August, but for now, they are wonderful.

These two, and their sisters up the hill on the fence, have gotten established during the winter and seem very healthy and happy.

This picture is kind of hard to see because of the weeds, but this silly little olive tree is completely covered with flowers. All that stuff that looks like pale leaves, those are flowers. If all turned to fruit, there would be at least a bushel of olives from this tree.

We are going to wait until fruit starts to develop and then prune off most of it.

This tree gets the prize for most new growth—almost a foot on the end of each branch.

Meanwhile, Joseph was finishing up the “neck” of the arbor and the circle.

When I went down to look at it, I was disappointed that the circle did not really look like a circle from outside. Also, not from this angle but from the other side, the arches in the "neck" looked crooked—even though Joseph had assured me that they and used the laser level to level them.

I pointed out these problems to him and he and I tried to decide what to do about them. First, we decided that the circle was too monotonous looking and that the archways needed to be more prominent.

We lowered the connecting 2 x 6’s to see if that would help. It did seem to help, but not be enough to completely solve the problem. We agreed to think about the problem until Friday and then decide what to do.

Here is a photo with the a couple of the connecting 2 x 6's lowered. It does allow you to notice the arches more, but makes the circle seem more cramped and the arches kind of scrawny. Obviously, it is not a complete solution.
I was quite pleased with the long stretch of the arbor. This is the south end and that little turn at the end gives it a lovely sense of place. The arbor debouches on a path—although it is not defined with bender-board yet.
Looking up toward the north end, the arbor has a nice curve which adds to the perspective as you look along it. Eventually, this will be obscured by climbing roses, but the bones of a garden structure inform the whole, even when they are obscured.

Looking south, you still get that nice perspective from the curve, but the “neck” jutting out looks less pleasing.

In real life, when you look from the north end of the rose garden, the arches in the “neck” look crooked. After some thought, I realized that, even though there is a fair slope down the rose garden, it is so regular that your eye does not register it as a slope. Therefore, even though you are looking down at the tops of the arches, your mind creates the illusion that they are tipping towards you. This made me respect those ancient Greeks even more, because they figured out a way to overcome these kinds of optical illusions when constructing their buildings.

I took a break from the arbor problem to photograph this rose and its friend. When we moved this rose from its old home, there was a nasturtium planted in the tub with it. When they dug up the rose, the nasturtium came along for the ride.

Both seem to be doing fine and the nasturtium is flourishing. The rose doesn’t seem to mind it being there and is still sending out new shoots and buds. I am thinking of planting more nasturtiums in some of the empty beds to fill them in for the summer until we plant more roses in the fall.

May 23, 2008  
The “neck” of the arbor to the center circle has been partially completed—the arches are in place.
The southern wing is finished.
Here it is from the stairs. You can also look through the stairs into the “neck.”
Looking straight up from the bottom of the stairs through the arches, you will be able to see the center circle when all is complete.
This is Gourmet Popcorn.
Magic Lantern again, looking mighty fine. This rose seems to be quite happy in the heat and wind.
It is a little hard to see the progress against the trees, but the arches march across the rose garden toward the central circle.
Jim got to the site in afternoon and took a swim in the pond—much to the consternation and amazement of the crew working on the arbor. They thought he would freeze before he got out.
The crew pours piers for the arches.
It is getting mighty dry for so early in the year. There is a huge fire down in the Santa Cruz mountains and there will be more before the year is over. I hope we get plenty good rain this winter.
A close-up of the completed southern wing and the partially complete “neck.”
The whole rose garden.
May 21, 2008  
The arbor is looking better and better.
Standing at the north end, looking south, you can see the gentle curve it takes
Here it is against the backdrop of the hills. Soon it will be much more visible, covered with roses.
We decided to level the middle circle to make it more comfortable to sit in . We took the ground from the north half down to the level of the middle and used that soil to build up the south half. It seems to have worked pretty well.
Here is the arbor from the south end
I forgot to look at the sign, but I think this is Magic Lantern, a hybrid tea rose.
This rose is called Austrian Copper, but it is a rose from Persia. My helper at my old garden called it the al-Q aida rose because it was so unhappy where it was. It seemed to be doing better here until we had the one-two punch of the week with freezing nights and the next week with 100°+ weather. It still has some viable leaves, but it doesn’t look all that great.
I took these pictures from the road between the pond and rose garden. The new camera has some automatic filters that make the sky a kind of improbable postcard blue. Oh well, I am not going to fix them in Photoshop, too much work.
Here is a view to the south from the same place at the bottom of the stairs.
The sycamores are looking great, despite the extremes in weather we have had—freezing one week, burning heat the next—and incredible wind every day.
Unfortunately, I don’t think one of my Valley Oaks is going to make it. It was the last one to leaf out and I think the combo of frost then heat did for it. Another one of the Valley Oaks is pretty burned, but does still have some green at the bottom, so it may survive. The other three, which leafed out earlier and whose leaves had darkened up before the frost, are fine.
Here is a final shot of the arbor progress from above.
May 16, 2008  

I didn’t take many photographs at the site today, but these roses blooming by the barn stairs just looked so beautiful. The white one in the foreground is a Sally Holmes and the one in the back is Phyllis Bide.

These are two of my favorite roses but I decided not to move either of them out of my old garden, since they are large, established and happy. Because of that, I have taken many cuttings in anticipation of this move and may have gone overboard a little in the number of these roses that I now have.

The Sally Holmes is in the ground by at the top of the bank by the barn and I have hopes that a row of these roses will make a spectacular backdrop for the barn.

The Phyllis Bides in tubs here, will have to wait until next year to get planted. We found last year, that planting roses once the ground dries out is very hard on the rose.

In the rose garden, where the soil is better, it won’t be as much of a problem, but up here, where the soil is incredibly heavy black clay, it is another matter. The rose we planted late last year struggled until the rains. I would rather wait until fall before putting anything in, so a lot of plants are going to have to wait.

May 14, 2008  
I was trying to take a picture of the Sally Holmes rose down by the gate, but was too lazy to walk down there. Although this picture was taken at about 7:30 am, it was already quite hot.
The roses still in tubs by the barn are blooming like crazy. It is too late to plant them this year because the ground dried out so fast. When you dig a hole in the hard clay, even if you fill it with a good soil mix, it is hard on the plant. We found this out last year with the roses we planted late in the season. They really struggled and we think it is because they had such a hard time working their roots into that dry clay.
We moved the aloes away from the barn into the irrigated area. They have already gotten a little greener. I like the way they look by the barn, but we will have to wait until the hose bib is installed there to put them back.
Joseph, the carpenter, was already at work on the arbor when I arrived.
Finally, I have a picture that does this rose justice! I have photographs of it from almost every visit to the site, but never have seemed to be able to take a decent shot of it. It is so vivid that you can see it from the house. If you look at the shot above this one, you can make it out on the far side of the garden.
Although this looks like the same rose as the previous one, it is actually our standard, Playboy, the one in the cast. I guess I must like roses that look like this, because I have two here and a Joseph’s Coat in my old garden, which has similar coloring.
The blooms on the new rose, President Macia, have opened up well, but the bush is almost prostrate. I hope it will toughen up a little bit as time goes on.

Toward the end of the day, the concrete was in for the southern wing of the arbor. The procedure is that holes are dug for each upright and concrete is poured with a bracket embedded in it.

Joseph is pre-constructing the arches, so the brackets need to fit the arches. The reason the wood lengths are laid out across the path is that they are being used to keep the two brackets in the correct relationship with each other while the concrete sets.

As you can see in this picture and the one above, the arbor will gently curve until it joins into a path at the south end of the garden.
May 9, 2008  

The arbor is going up well. Here, we are looking south down the main arm of the arbor. The central arch at the top of the stairs is complete and we are working north and south from there.

The carpenter wasn’t at the site today because it was just a hole digging day. My assistant is doing most of the hole digging for the posts. He and I worked out the locations for all the posts south of the stairs. It is a bit of a problem because in order to curve the arbor, the posts on the pond side need to be further apart than the posts on the garden side. The curve gets sharper at the end of the arbor, so the distances vary. Making the arbor curve but still maintaining a harmonious spacing of the arches took us a while to work out.

The completed square at the top of the stairs is not really a square, it is fudged a little because when we eye-balled the stair location, we did not get it perfectly perpendicular to the arbor path. Meanwhile, we want the “neck” of the arbor, which will connect the long section with the circle in the center of the garden, to seem exactly perpendicular.

Hopefully, when all is complete, it will fool the eye into believing that everything is straight and true. We will see.

Here is the daily picture of Playboy, our rose in the cast. It is blooming to beat the band and I am getting superstitious about needing to photograph it every time I visit the garden. I wonder what the trunk will look like when we take the cast off. I am going to give it a couple of months before I do.

This is a rose that I bought at auction at the rose symposium at Hearst Castle. It is called President Macia and is a hybrid tea from the 1930’s. It was donated to the Heritage Rose Foundation for their benefit auction and wasn’t blooming at the time, so didn’t go for as high a price as some of the other plants. There was a second one which was blooming however, and I was quite taken with it, plus thought I should chip in with a donation.

The thing I really wanted at the auction was the chance to name a rose from a famous rose breeder from Lyon. This rose, quite a gorgeous orange-red, is entered in this year’s rose championship at Bagatelle in Paris—quite a big deal. Unfortunately, the price for that privilege went well beyond my budget.

President Macia is quite a pretty rose and seems to be taking well to its new home, already setting blooms. It is supposed to be very fragrant, and our conditions should help it to show well.
This is another hybrid tea which was a birthday gift last summer. It is called Gentle Giant and is much prettier in real life than the lurid pink it looks like here.

Most of the roses we moved from my current garden (soon to be my old garden, I guess) are doing wonderfully well. The only ones which seem to be floundering a bit are some of the reds.

This rose, a David Austin rose called Heritage, has always looked spindly and leggy before. It got cut back rather severely during the move, but is bushing out much more vigorously than it ever did previously and the flowers are much larger and on sturdier stems as well.

This rose was another birthday gift from, I think, 2004. It came from a nursery in Petaluma and has been in a pot in my old garden waiting for this space to be ready. It was quite vigorous and very thorny in the pot, so I am expecting it to turn into something of a monster here. It is called Julia Renaissance. I am not sure what kind of rose it is because it is so stickery, I haven’t ever gotten a good look at the label.

My Rosa Rugosa Alba is so happy now. It has been languishing in the old garden and looking thinner and more sparse every year. I can tell from the new growth that it has taken a new lease on life.

This is a species rose, I think one of the original varieties of roses. It has quite interesting leaves, which are sort of crinkled. There is a red variety and some very pretty rugosa hybrids. I had one, but it did not do well in the old location and I managed to kill it.

This is my White Meidland, a shrub rose. I think this might be one of the first roses developed by Meiland for planting by freeways.

Meiland is a French rose breeder who inherited his father’s company. My belief—although I have never heard this baldly stated— is that the company was almost defunct and Monsieur Meiland needed a way to make more money. He decided to try to breed a very hearty, pest-free ground cover rose, which bloomed constantly. He was successful in this and then was able to persuade the French version of CalTrans to plant them all along the Autoroutes. Needless to say, his company is now hugely successful.

This is another groundcover rose, called Jeepers Creepers. The reason it is so thin is that it has been battling with black acacias for years in my old garden. These trees fill any area where there is water or fertilizer with roots very fast. I have a small bed that I plant with new annuals several times a year and each time, we must completely dig out the bed and pull out all the roots.

This poor rose was in a tub filled with acacia roots. The fact that it didn’t get strangled is a testimony to its toughness. It already looks much happier than it has in a long time.

This is a new rose, a hybrid tea called Iceberg. There is a climbing version of it that is very popular, but now I won’t need to get that, since I have the bush version. (I have a bit of a climber jones.)

This view is looking south past the French Lace standard.

My assistant and I marked out the new beds on the area where the dirt pile was (behind me in this photograph), but of course I forgot to take a picture. When I get busy with something, I never think to photograph it.

Here is another picture of Sombrieul, a climber moved from my old garden. I really did not think this rose would make it since it was a fairly large climber which I pruned back severely and was not dug up very well. However, this rose showed its toughness and is fluffing right out.

Its child, via cutting, is in a tub up by the barn. I had not planned to dig up this rose, but it was in a very bad location in the old garden and I thought it would die anyway if I left it there so decided to make the attempt. Now, I have two living barbed-wire fences—all be it beautiful ones—to find homes for.

The pond still looks beautiful, but I can tell that it is going to get very low this year since it has been so dry.

The sycamores frame the way to the dock nicely. I am going to have to measure the sycamores in front of my mother’s house to figure out how tall to pollard mine. I want them to be generous but not extremely tall.

We have bullfrogs in the pond and all day we can hear them croaking. They are not native and have superceded some native frogs but they are quite amazing to hear.
May 7, 2008  
I have hired a carpenter to build the arbor by the rose garden. When I arrived at the site on Wednesday, he already had some of the arches constructed and lying in a stack. The look very short but are actually 8' tall.
Here is my French Lace standard, blooming mightily. Last week, it looked pink, but that is all gone now and it is back to its customary ecru/cream color.
This is Cocktail, which just blasts out the first bloom. This is a cutting taken from the plant in my current garden and is two years old. It will climb up one of the arbor posts being installed around the central circle in the garden.
Opps! This rose, which I thought was another Cocktail cutting, is actually Veilchenblau. It is a purple once-bloomer and very pretty, but it is in the wrong place and will need to be moved.
Radway Sunrise is just getting prettier each week.
Our miracle rose, Playboy, is still pumping out blooms.
The carpenter has these stands to hold a string line which I had never seen before. They look very handy.
You can’t see in this picture, but there is a string marking the straight lines for the posts and stretching all the way across the circle.
As I left this afternoon, I saw our neighbor, the resident gobbler, making its way up the hill to its roost. I couldn’t see too well, but I think this might be the male.
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