First up… Happy New Year! Don’t you just love a fresh start! A clean slate to fill up! Time to start planning our next garden season in earnest!
PICTURE TIME!
I am so glad we have pictures! Especially in winter! While I pour over the pictures of last year, the memories of the varmints gets fainter and fainter. But not so faint that I didn’t ask Santa for a super duper sprayer. I plan to be excessively spraying of all those smelly things that make the varmints feel less at home!
The pictures prove it! We have so many good days. #grateful
JUST PEACHY!
Have you seen Pantone color of the year for 2024? It’s a beauty! Peach Fuzz…
From Pantone…
PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz captures our desire to nurture ourselves and others. It’s a velvety gentle peach tone whose all-embracing spirit enriches mind, body, and soul.
I am in love with this color – especially in the garden! One of the reasons I love Mother of Pearl roses so much is that she goes peachy. Many call her pink/salmon but she’s definitely more peach than pink in my garden.
Here is Mother of Pearl with my very favorite peach rose — Petite Peach 🍑…
REMINDER
Petite Peach 🍑 and so many other beauties will be available again at High Country Roses starting January 10! Don’t delay! HighCountryRoses.com
CREAMINESS
It seems that I’m also falling in love with all the creamy colored roses this year. If the pictures don’t get you, the names just might. Here’s my creamy list…
CREAM VERANDA
Floribunda (Tim Hermann Kordes, Germany, 1997)
A beautifully romantic rose with old fashioned quartered blooms in delicate shades of apricot. Flowers are lightly perfumed on a disease resistant, compact shrub. Performs well in hot climates. This variety is ideal for use in patio containers or can be used in landscapes where a low growing compact plant is desired.
TOP CREAM
Hybrid Tea (Alain Meilland, France, 2021)
The large, old-fashioned blooms of this special rose harken back to an old cottage garden. Flowers are extremely fragrant with notes of anise and earthy pear. Its abundant petals are creamy white with an occasional light blush. It exhibits excellent disease resistance and is a wonderful rose for cut floral arrangements.
CHANTILLY CREAM
Hybrid Tea (Christian Bédard, United States, 2021)
A classic hybrid tea featuring large (4″-5″), very full blooms and a strong citrus aroma. Light yellow blended flowers are delicate yet stand up to the heat of summer without missing a beat. Very strong resistance to such diseases as rose rush, downy mildew and powdery mildew.
Creama (Reminiscent Series)
Shrub / released by Proven Winners
Not quite white and not quite yellow, Reminiscent® Crema shrub rose combines the best of all worlds with blooms the hue of fresh buttermilk. Each big, full bloom boasts a very high petal count and a delightful fragrance. The perfect choice for adding classic beauty to the landscape or flower garden! Clean, vigorous growth and foliage, with no deadheading required for continuous bloom. Disease Resistant / Long Blooming / Heat Tolerant / Size: 2.5 X 2
Aren’t these just amazing!! Are you growing any of these? I’d love to hear how they are doing for you.
ROSE CHAT
The 2024 Rose Chat Season starts in February. We have some wonderfully rosy friends joining in!
First up will be the amazing Gaye Hammond chatting about The History of Roses: America’s True Native Plant. Of course, Gaye will teach us but she will also entertain us! I can’t wait! Read more about Gaye here.
Winter is a good time to catch on chats you might have missed during the busy season! Here are four great chats! But there are so many more!!
GARDEN DESIGN TIPS & TRICKS: Michael Marriott and Paul Zimmerman
These two are the best in the business and generously gave us so many tips! Perfect for garden planning season!
(LISTEN HERE)
GRACE ROSE FARM: Gracie Poulson
Learn about the beautiful work of this farm and hear about oh so many beautiful roses!
(LISTEN HERE.)
MY TRIP TO ENGLAND
Kimberley Dean (The Rose Geek)
Kimberley shares how this trip changed her and her garden!
(LISTEN HERE)
GARDENS OF THE NORTHEAST: Stephen Scanniello
Stephen uses his razor sharp wit and his incredible rose knowledge to tell the “story” behind the story and this podcast is full of them!!
(LISTEN HERE)
POTTING SHED PUTTERINGS
This week I potted up my White Geraniums (Maverick). My garden journal tells me that I planted the tiny seeds on December 13 and they germinated in three days!! Now 3 weeks later they are showing off those lovely leaves! Three of them grew so large in the broadcast seed tray that I potted them up to 4″ pots. They have a long away to go! I sure hope they do well!
I bought my seeds at Park Seed. I received 10 seeds and I have 10 plants!
FROM PARK…
Maverick is an annual geranium, which is to say not a true geranium at all, but a pelargonium.
They are a southern gardener’s salvation, thriving even in the sopping-wet humidity and searing heat of our summers. Other container plants look wilted even the same day you water them, but never Maverick. It’s compact, well-branched, large-flowered, and thoroughly agreeable to weather extremes. We wouldn’t want anything less for our terracotta pots and white window boxes.
Maverick is a very compact plant, reaching just 14 to 16 inches high (in full bloom) and nearly as wide. The foliage is large, softly lobed and creased, and bright green. It forms bushy rosettes beneath the flowering stems, which hold their giant spheres of blooms several inches above the rest of the plant.
I absolutely love, love, love annual geraniums (pelargoniums) and I think Thyme Out (my outdoor potting area) is just the place to have several white Mavericks!
One more thing…
Ever wonder about the origins of the geranium/pelargonium debate? Through the years I have heard many things. So, I asked the internet this week why pelargoniums are called geraniums and here’s what I found…
The name Pelargonium was first proposed by Johann Jacob Dillenius, a German botanist, in 1732 who described and illustrated seven species of geraniums from South Africa that are now classified as Pelargonium. Although it was Johannes Burman, who formally introduced the name pelargonium in 1738.
It was a simple mistake. Linnaeus thought the plants were close enough relatives to put both types in the genus Geranium. But Charles L’Héritier saw things differently and separated them into two genera in 1789. The change was widely accepted even back then and still holds today.
⭐️ And… we are still talking about it today. Right or wrong, some things just stick! Regardless of what we call them… they give us quintessential cottage garden beauty.
UP NEXT
The next fun winter projects around here will be planting Lisianthus and Winter Sowing. The extended forecast looks like we are going to have a bit of winter after all. What are you up to?
Until next time…
To make a great garden, one must have a great idea or a great opportunity.
Sir George Sitwell
Essay on the Making of Gardens (1909)
Hybrid tea roses are still popular?! I get the impression that they are passe and old fashioned. I still grow some of the same hybrid tea roses that I grew while in high school in the early 1980s.
Are most of your roses fragrant?
Oh, almost none are significantly fragrant. Most are hybrid tea roses that I started planting before about 1984, and then brought here a few years ago. Those that are supposedly fragrant are only scarcely so. Only a few are slightly more fragrant floribunda roses (which I did NOT select). At work, only a few are almost imperceptibly fragrant floribundas and hybrid teas. The vast majority are trashy carpet roses. The largest colony is a crowded double roadside row that is likely more than two hundred feet long Yuck.
My family just celebrated Old Christmas on Saturday, January 06, 2024, with lots of delicious food, even a Three Kings’ cake, and presents. Do you know about Old Christmas? Two of my relatives each got 6 huge red blooms from their gifted amaryllis bulbs. Camellias are now in bloom and so lovely. Your pictures are beautiful. I love seeing your roses! I have been making orange roses from the rinds of navel oranges. So pretty! We watched the Pasadena, CA, Orange Bowl Parade with so many beautiful fresh roses and other flowers. WOW! The floats were extraordinary. Happy New Year to you and Mr. G. Thank you for your blogs.
I love it that you celebrate old Christmas! Special tradition. I’d love to see your orange roses! We forgot to watch the rose bowl parade! I love that parade! Oh well. Have a wonderful new year!
It is rather late. . . If you have a fresh orange or a navel orange, try and peel the rind from the top of the orange and try and keep it intact without it breaking. Then start at one end and make a tight bud and just finish rolling the whole peel into a circle. You can also use the skin of a fresh tomato to make a tomato rose using the same technique. So pretty as a centerpiece on a pretty tray plate with fresh fruit or fresh veggies.