May Roses

May and September are the chief months for roses here; in the summer months Japanese beetles eat them up.

This is a China/ Gallica cross that I got from a trade. The shrub is arching and fountain-like, mostly thornless, with one big flush of bloom in spring. The flowers are wine-red/ purple and fragrant.

'Pink Pillar' is a rose that I'm not sure I would have picked if I hadn't seen it in person. The red buds open to these delightful sunset pink fragrant flowers. I saw this rose blooming in combination with the climbing miniature 'Work of Art'. Normally I hate pink and orange together and dislike miniatures, but the combination was a wonderful one.

'Mutabilis' is truly well-named. I'm always amazed to see these tangerine buds

open to these pale cool pink flowers

that then darken to raspberry pink.

'Belinda's Dream'

'Sombrueil'

'Veilchenblau' looks its most lavender/ purple to me in the midday sun, which has surprised me. In the morning sun it has more of a wine-red color. Its fragrance, which is not at all rose-like, is sweet and wafting. I think some people can detect it and others cannot.

These 'Veilchenblau' are growing as free-standing mounds at the border of the vegetable garden, where they may eventually become monsters. lol At least it hardly has any thorns. I'm layering it so that I can also grow it on the fence between the pasture and the old front yard.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day and Blooming Friday

Eva's White

Spiderwort, possibly 'Osprey'

Noid blue iris

Dianthus

'Jelly Bean'

The Atamasco lilies have been blooming for almost 2 months now. Perhaps
they are buried at different depths. This lily is in one of our fields.

Columbine

'Archduke Charles'

'Duchesse de Brabant'

'Pink Pillar'

Rugosa rubra with Gulf Coast Penstemon

Perennial sweet pea

Corn Poppy, which doesn't really fit into the color scheme.

Baptisia alba with Eastern columbine

Baptisia australis

Phlox pilosa

Pink showy primrose

'Belinda's Dream' (top) with unknown rose, stalks of Verbena
bonariensis, and a flower of 'Veilchenblau' in the background.

'Hansa' with Baptisia alba and 'Purple Smoke'; 'Knockout' in far background.

'Dusky Challenger'

'Clotilde Soupert'

'Marie Pavie'

Thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Bloom Day and Katarina at roses and stuff for hosting Blooming Friday.

Parents and Offspring

Niche Gardens in Chapel Hill sells roses that perform well with no spray in our area. One of these is the rugosa hybrid 'Sir Thomas Lipton'. We bought this rose for my MIL for Mother's Day a few years ago and I rooted a cutting last year. Unlike many rugosas, this one is easy to root. It's quite a big rose and presumably got its size from R. rugosa alba. Helpmefind lists alba as getting to 5-7' in height. However, I have alba and mine barely tops 3 1/2 feet.

As it turns out, I have both parents of 'Sir Thomas Lipton' in my garden: rugosa alba and the polyantha 'Clotilde Soupert'.

I grew a half a dozen rugosa alba from seed 6 years ago. Alba doesn't seem to mind the hot sticky Southeast a bit. No disease, no problems at all except for Japanese beetles chomping the flowers in June and July. The flowers of rugosa alba smell just like cloves.

'Clotilde Soupert' is about the most sumptuous and romantic-looking rose possible. It has many many petals (over 100 per flower), and a very strong sweet "old rose" perfume. I've heard people complain about the flowers balling in wet conditions, but no such problems here so far. It's quite a small rose too, hard-pressed to reach 3 feet, and thornless. One of my all-time favorites.

'Sir Thomas Lipton' is a fountain-like shrub with long weeping branches. Like 'Clotilde Soupert' it has a wonderful fragrance, and like alba it has a lot of thorns. The family resemblance is rather apparent when you see them all together. Still, STL and its parents reminds of one of those families with two small parents and a son over 6' tall.

It seems to me that in the summer the flowers have more of that rumpled quality that many rugosa
hybrids have, but in the spring and fall, the flowers have the beautiful form of Clotilde Soupert.