Spring Flush!

I have been like a kid in a candy store the past week! My roses started their Spring flush. Now I have neglected them over the past 3 years because I could not work with them due to arthritis. My new medicine hasn't cured it, but I can do things a lot better this year. I had 8 plants that I moved to a special part of my garden. This is my rose hospital. These plants were alive, but just barely. I put them in a place that gets full sun for most of the day. It is just a better place for them. It is next to the woods so that I can toss the less fortunate out there. I lost most of my roses through neglect and I lost one to stupidity. I tried to use some fertilizer that was too strong on my beautiful Knockout rose and ended up over doing it. I burned it up! Now I only use a water soluble fertilizer. I was able to take some canes from it before it completely died and had many offspring from this one plant. Let me show you some of the roses in my garden this year.

Above is an antique rose that I grew from a cutting. This is a three year old plant. My mother in law brought this rose back from Ohio with her to North Carolina when she was a teenager. That is the way I understood it. My mother in law will turn 90 years old this year. I am sure this was a popular garden variety rambler in its day. I don't know the name of it. This rose has the classic rose fragrance. I will be taking more cuttings of this one this year.

This rose is a rugosa called "Sir Thomas Lipton."  It stands about 4 feet tall as a three year old shrub. It blooms several times through the year, but the Spring flush is the most vibrant. Believe it or not, this is a bad year for this one. I have seen this rose with so many blooms that you could barely see the foliage. It has a sweet clove fragrance.

This is a floribunda rose called "Europena."  It was mislabeled as a "Mr. Lincoln" hybrid tea. It is a small compact little rose and a good companion for annual bedding plants.

This is a "Mr. Lincoln" rose. A hybrid tea with long stemmed red fragrant roses. I wish that I could get a field of these to bloom in February for Valentine's Day! I have trouble getting this one to live! I thought that it had died last year and it came back to what you see here. It requires pampering and it will grow up to about 6 feet tall. Kind of ugly as a stand alone rose because it is gangly in appearance. Better suited to the back of a rose garden to hide the long gangly canes. One of the best fragrances in the rose world!

This is a "Sunny Knockout" rose that I bought this year. It will grow to about three feet tall by three feet in diameter when it is fully mature. I love all of the "Knockout" varieties because they bloom continuously through the growing season. No fragrance here though. That is the only fault that I have found with this rose. These blooms start out vibrant yellow and fade to a cream color. 

The last rose that I want to show you is called "Pink Grootendorst."  One of my favorite rugosa roses. Hardly any fragrance, which is unusual for a rugosa. Grootendorst also comes in white and red varieties with the same bloom form and carnation appearance.

This is not all of my roses, but I have to stop somewhere with this post. :) I wish these roses had been in better form this year, but that will be something to work on throughout the season. I have yet to deal with the Japanese Beetles, on whom I will show no mercy this year.  I am glad that I was able to have any roses at all to show you all this year. That in itself is somewhat of a miracle. My wife calls this my "therapy." I suppose that she is right. Perhaps I will go outside after while and have a group session. :)