Naked in the Roses: New Beginnings

Thursday, December 31, 2009

New Beginnings

With the new year approaching I'm reminded of my favorite side of the pruning season; beginning new plants from cuttings. What seems like a mountain of useless debris, the pile of pruned branches, has always held so much promise of new life for me. Dozens of new plants can be had from the prunings, and perhaps you should keep this in mind. If you'd like a simple primer, turn to the Vintage Gardens website and go to our Plant Care page in the green menu bar. Select Rose Care, and you'll find our photo essays of pruning, which take you through several very different rose shrubs and how we prune them. The second series is Pruning a Medium Sized Shrub Rose and Making Hardwood Cuttings. This will get you started. The old gardener's method is to stick those prepared heel cuttings directly into the ground under the mother plant. A year from now you can dig up those new babies and give them a home!

This year I lost my dearest companion, a Rat Terrier named Tyccho. He was an indomitable trapper of gophers, the sourge of my garden, subterrannean vegetarians that delight in the succulent roots of roses. I lose about 50 to 100 plants each year to gophers, but Tyccho managed to catch more than 100 gophers each year. When I lost him, I wondered how I could ever replace him in the garden. A few months later I adopted a new Rat Terrier, Virgil. He is just six months old today, but two days ago he caught his first gopher, and yesterday a young roof rat. There's more than a promise of roses for the coming year, on this last, cold night of December.

Happy New Year to all of you!

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Preserving a Garden of Old and Rare Roses—Can it be Done?

Preserving a Garden of Old and Rare Roses—Can it be Done?

In my garden I grow over 4000 rose plants of all classes and types. Like a museum of roses, the garden tells the story of roses from the most ancient to the most recent. But, unlike a museum, it is a living organism, always growing through cycles of bloom and renewal. Along with the roses live gophers, hummingbirds, pigmy rabbits, the occasional deer, and a host of other life forces—some welcome, and others not. The garden and its collection of rare roses are known by many rose lovers around the world, and have been shared with other gardeners and gardens for the past 26 years. Today it stands on the edge of disappearing, and in this blog I hope to share with you both the peril that threatens it and the effort that has begun now to preserve it.

The Friends of Vintage Roses
A garden is a temporary thing, it is often said, destined to disappear with its creator. But I do not agree. A garden is an idea that once experienced lives in the minds of those who can imagine it. It belongs to no one and to everyone. Once I understood this my garden began to live. It has lived for many years now in the minds of those who have visited it, and those who have only imagined visiting it. It has the power to elevate all of us to Cloud Eleven.

Roses are powerful life forces, pulled from the imaginations of artists over many centuries of human existence. They speak to us, and if we listen and can hear them, they have much to say. They transcend their creators, their admirers and their custodians---they transcend us and inspire us. Their powerful sway bore fruit in a gathering of people who wanted them and heard them calling---the Friends of Vintage Roses. This scattered group began to coalesce about a decade ago one May in the garden I had built. These people have pulled together once again for the roses to keep alive a vision, a dream and an inspiration. Their hard work and pragmatism account for the survival of so many beautiful beings, and they work now to spread the word, the joy and the delight of old roses.