Garden porn

I've learned one thing about myself in my almost four years of blogging: the more important something is to me, the less I tend to talk about it on my blog.

I don't know whether you've noticed, but I'm mostly about the idle chatter. Nattering on about nothing. Spouting pure sparkling sprays of crystalline drivel. Notice how I've found several different ways to say I'm full of shit? Yeah, like that.

So we've agreed that my blog is basically small talk writ large, right? I mean, I'm surprised I haven't asked you what your sign is.

You'll find almost no references to politics and religion here. Or my family. Things like my doctoral dissertation, Asperger's syndrome, menopause, and the current state of the Episcopal Church don't seem to come up. Neither do most of my interests. Unless they are interests that make me look unbelievably shallow.

Which is OK with me. As a dear friend of mine says, "shallow is the new deep."

Well, that friend is in the hospital, and her prognosis is grim. So I'm looking to talk about almost anything, as long as it's shallow enough.

So yay for garden porn! Specifically rose garden porn, because roses are my true love. I've been growing them for almost 20 years.

Not well, though. Some of my roses come back year after year with admirable reliability. A couple of them were in the yard when we bought the house, and I can't identify the plants. If I could, I'd buy more of them, because honestly, they are amazing. I give them no winter protection at all, yet up they come every spring.

But I always manage to kill a few. Some I haven't been able to kill at all are the Canadian Explorer series. They're cold hardy to Zone 2, I believe, and are also pretty much disease-free. Of course, they're not the most gorgeous roses you've ever seen, and they have no fragrance. But they're extremely vigorous, meaning "even Poppy, the rose destroyer, cannot harm them."

Today I was trying to fill in a bed with a lot of blank places where the bodies were until I shovel-pruned them. There are three big gorgeous John Cabots in the back. They grow to between five and six feet.


And I have those mystery hybrid teas, both red. So I thought I'd get some roses that work with what's there, in size and color. (It's really a lot like picking furniture, when you think about it.) So today I bought a few Baronne Prevosts--old fashioned roses (hybridized in 1842) with that classic Redoute centifolia look, and fat round buds like babies' fists.


To put between the soft red John Cabots and the pink Baronne Prevosts, I picked "Whisper," a new hybrid tea by Jackson and Perkins--creamy white, with long, elegant buds and a lot of fragrance.


Then I picked some pink "Gnome" ground cover bushes as a border.

So this is what we're looking at.


Which means that tomorrow, my husband will celebrate Father's Day by sitting at his ease in the back yard while he watches me digging, planting, and watering. AND SWEATING.