Greetings and salutations everyone; here I am, Chess the purebred border collie, ready to entertain you on this bleak and snowy day. You may remember me from such delightful posts as “Bright White” and “A Snow Day” (which this is, too), among so many, many others.
Here I am in an extremely characteristic pose.
It’s snowing, and so this is what you do.
It isn’t snowing a lot, and the guy I live with said, when we came back from our morning walk, that he was going to spend the day sowing seeds out on the patio. In the snow. He’s done that before, but that was back when he was working and spare time was precious. Now, well, he reminded me that today is Mozart’s birthday (“had he lived, he would have been 258”, he said, which is the sort of thing my mommy had to put up with, and now I get all of it just for myself) and so he declared a holiday, and we aren’t doing anything.
He said I should post, anyway, even though he’s not doing anything, so I thought it might be nice to show more of my mommy’s digital pictures. These are oreganos, poppies, and roses today.
Some poppies. The white one is ‘Marschall von der Goltz.’
Now the rose, ‘Madame Hardy’.
This might be ‘Madame Isaac Pereire’.
‘Felicité Parmentier’.
‘Cardinal de Richelieu’.
‘Nymphenburg’.
‘Nevada’.
‘Lawrence Johnston’
Rosa foetida.
Lastly, the hips of Rosa heckeliana subsp. orientalis; the guy I live with grew the rose from seed. This is a dwarf rose from Turkey, with foliage scented like R. eglanteria.
Well, that’s it. This is what we do when we’re bored. I hope you enjoyed these pictures. I better get back to what I was doing.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Thanks, Chess. Those beautiful photos certainly lifted my spirits on this gray day in Fort Worth.
You’re welcome. These pictures were all taken long before I showed up here. Back when the guy I live with was into roses.
thanks, Bob. i can practically smell the roses…
Sure. On the rare days with humidity, the back yard smelled like roses ….
As the kids say, Chess, wow, just wow. Lawrence Johnston is notoriously hard to grow, and your mommy caught one flourishing. Also, whites are so hard for a lens to capture, and here’s Madame Hardy looking splendid, Nevada too. Seems like your mommy, Chess, was intrigued by the delicacy of petals as the shots of Nymphenburg bear out. And I cannot tell if the photos show Madame Isaac Pereire. Do names matter, Chess? I’ve had luminaries in the heritage rose world – yes, more than one – stand in my garden and point out the majority of the roses growing are not what they were sold to me as. Your mommy also reminds me to pay more attention to – as in *take care of* – and feature the oregano hanging over the rose box.
I understand and honor the guy you live with’s philosophy and reasoning which led to the new garden, but the old one was the romantic garden I aspire to. Wow, just wow.
Yeah, thanks. It was kind of a hard thing to watch the guy I live with remove the roses, but he did. Actually, some are still here. Kanzanlik, Mme. Isaac, etc. Lawrence Johnston was enormous, with roots the size of a small car, but it got blackspot, which used to be rare in Colorado. I think he shed a tear when he chopped it out. Most of the roses came from what was then called High Country Rosarium, in Denver, little own-root plants. Felicite Parmentier came from Roses of Yesterday and Today in California.
Dammit. I was just getting over my rose phase.
Probably everyone goes through phases. There have been many, many phases here. Way too many phases for the gardener’s own good. Now there are lot of empty spaces, testament to the Great Upheaval, in itself a phase.
Beautiful. Thanks.
You’re welcome. I think that was all the rose pictures. Probably taken at the beginning of the century.
Oh, that was a wonderful catalog, Roses of Yesterday and Today. I had roses from them in my Seattle garden. There is a good chapter in Onward and Upward in the Garden about that place. (By Katharine S White)
It was a nice catalog. Lots of roses came from there, but most came from High Country Rosarium, now High Country Roses.
Having also gone through a rose phase some time back, my grammy is now of the mind that roses are best enjoyed in pictures. Although she still has a few remaining heirlooms and some tough rugosas, their names have been lost to the ages and they are allowed to remain on the condition that they continue to behave themselves, as my grammy says that life is too short to spend time on ungrateful plants.
Your grammy is spot on, as they say. The guy I live with now feels that way about agaves. This is the end of a phase. Six nights of subzero (F) temperatures made the decision easy. Well, it’s not really a decision, it’s more a thing that gradually creeps up on the gardener. I can tell when it’s happening to the guy I with with. He starts pacing and stuff. Mumbling to himself.
We fight the site at our peril, no? (Mumbling rarely being a very good sign.)
A very common phenomenon, especially here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Within limits, I guess.
Oh no, no, no, no. When I started working on my garden book I promised myself that I would not, never, ever let myself become one of those people who has a thing about roses. Roses and rose people are just Not Cool.
So of course the one flower that I will now go out of my way to spend time with is a rose. I can’t believe that I know the difference between a floribunda and a noisette, or that I will lovingly gaze at photographs of roses and feel drenched in the delicacy of their scent, the impossibility of their hues, the velvet-osity of their petals…like I just did on your blog.
Yes, I am in the throes of my “rose phase” and Chess, your Mommy’s photos are insanely delicious…I can tell by the angles of her shots that she was studying their structure and gradations of color for future illustrations. Her eye is exquisite. Her taste is impeccable. And she really understood the soul of a rose.