The Salvia From Hell

Yes, rose pruning continues. Today I was up on the ladder trimming 'Altissimo', but spent much more of the day digging out The Salvia From Hell, aka Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue'. This salvia has gorgeous blue flowers on black stems. An internet search will turn up many beautiful photos. This post, however, shows only the ugly parts of the plant. It's a thug, filling the soil with roots plus these lovely, rat-shaped root tubers:



I spent hours today pulling out two trash barrels of roots:


I will also spend hours next January pulling out S. guaranitica 'Black And Blue' roots yet again. I can't have possibly gotten them all--I never do. In a month or two, new sprouts will emerge.

In the tumult that is Spring, I won't see them until I spot the first gorgeous spike of blue flowers. Those blue flowers will be so beautiful, I'll leave them...and then next January that area of the garden will again be stuffed full of horrible roots and tubers. Who says plants are dumb? They are learning they need only produce blue flowers to take over the world.

Though a lot of the garden is but towers of bare prickly sticks, there's some pink and coral here and there. Yucca 'Bright Star', pinks up in the winter, and Euphorbia tirucalli 'Sticks On Fire' turns a brilliant coral and nicely mimics the shape of the bare, pruned roses. Pink and coral look really good to me now. Much better than blue.

World Class Aloes

This weekend, the Aloes at the Huntington Library in San Marino were in their full winter glory. Hummingbirds were zooming everywhere, fighting over the flowers and the sweet nectar within. The Desert Garden at the Huntington is world class, unquestionably a piece of Eden.








This one isn't an Aloe, but it was in full winter glory:

David Austin Roses -- Selection Criteria

'Golden Celebration'

Michael Marriott, who works for David Austin Roses, gave a talk today at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I found the following points from his talk of particular interest:

Mr. Marriott said David Austin roses are selected for introduction based on the following criteria:

Criteria #1: The overall beauty and grace of the plant and the flowers. The flowers should nod slightly so that they meet you: they "look you in the eye". The plant must be beautiful as well as the flowers. There must be a charm and grace, above all.


'Charles Rennie Mackintosh'

Criteria #2: The fragrance. While an otherwise extraordinary rose might be excused the lack of a wonderful fragrance, a rose should have fragrance. Roses are special in that they have many different fragrances. While a sweet pea always smells essentially like a sweet pea, and a Lilac always smells Lilac, different roses have many different scents. According to Mr. Marriott, there are five main categories of rose scents:
Old Rose, Fruity, Musk, Tea, and Myhrr.

"Old Rose" is the classic rose fragrance of the Gallicas and Damask roses. Fruity may be citrus, strawberry, banana, peach, or any number of other sweet familiar scents. Mr. Marriott described "Musk" as "clove-like", and unlike the other fragrances, which come from the petals of the flower, "musk" comes from the stamens. "Tea" fragrance of course evokes fresh tea, and "Myhrr" is anise or licorice. Fragrance is complex and can be made up of several types of scents, such as fruity-tea, or Old Rose mixed with Myhrr. The rose may also have variations of fragrance as it develops, or may be influenced by the weather conditions, especially humidity and temperature. The Austin company consults with a retired perfume expert who acts as the company's "nose" to describe the scents of each particular rose.

Criteria #3: Disease resistance and health. A rose that has no resistance to Blackspot, or no vigor, is a frustration. Gardening can be frustrating enough without adding a weak plant to the mix.


'Cressida'

Having grown many different David Austin roses for quite a few years, I was completely unsurprised by the criteria Mr. Marriott listed. This is exactly what I get from David Austin roses: beauty and overall charm come first, fragrance is a close second, and disease resistance is up there on the list, but it isn't #1, or #2.

This is a different approach to roses than what I see in, (for example) the Kordes roses, who appear to put disease resistance first and foremost. I have a few of the newest Kordes roses, and I can say at least in this garden, their disease resistance is superb. But fragrance often isn't there, and overall beauty doesn't quite approach the Austins. It's a choice. What are you willing to sacrifice? What can you sacrifice?

Some climates simply demand disease resistance--there is no other way to keep roses alive. In this climate, I have the luxury of putting beauty and fragrance first. Not everyone does. The world is big enough for both aesthetics, surely. There is no right or wrong way.

I might venture to say that there is a practical way and a deliriously passionate way. Which did I choose?


'Tradescant'

1,000 Gallons: How Green Was My Water

In the January 18th post, I wrote that I hoped to fill up a tank with rain water. Mission accomplished. We received about six inches of rain in the past six days. This is a big deal because our average yearly rain total is 13 inches.



I recalculated the size of the tank, discovering that it holds over a thousand gallons. A thousand gallons of free water! Yeeee Haaaa! If you saw our water bill, you'd understand why I'm excited.

Of course I realize this is a little futile. A thousand gallons is not a lot of water. It will saturate the driest parts of the garden and postpone turning the sprinklers back on only for a couple extra weeks. What we could really use is a huge underground cistern, saving up rain water during the rainy season from October through April and using it when water rates jump in summertime.

If you think a little longer, you realize what we really need is a garden consisting of a small drip-irrigated vegetable patch, some succulents like Agaves and Aloes, a few native Coast Live Oak trees that can live on winter rain alone, and nothing else.

This is because a huge underground cistern might cost (at minimum) ten thousand dollars, all spent to save (at most), a thousand dollars on the yearly water bill. Payback would take a good long while. It might come to that, though, if I want to keep the roses.

No matter what the State of California tells you, there's plenty of water in the Sierras. The problem is getting it from there to here. There's also plenty of rain water wasted in Southern California. Hundreds upon hundreds of billions of gallons of water fell from the sky during the past six days, and most of it is already back in the ocean.

Local reservoirs to store water above ground and settlement basins to refill the local aquifers could vastly reduce the need to import water from the Sierras. However, new reservoirs require money and location, political will and rational thought, which California lacks these days. So, it comes back to individual effort. My individual effort is a thousand gallons the past six days. It's something. It will go into the soil instead of right back into the ocean. It's not water from the for-profit water corporation now free to pour all the money it likes into influencing elections. It's water that's free, from the sky.

Subroutine Gardening

Rose pruning does not continue. It's on hold. I did get out there this morning before today's storm arrived and put two new roses into the ground. They were imprisoned in the garage in a plastic bag, sprouting new growth and crying for the glory of the sun and the life-giving earth. I believe I might have heard their tiny cries somehow, there in the dark. It is pure cruelty to have them miss all this beautiful rain, so I was determined to plant them before the rain returned. The soil is nowhere near saturated. If it was, I could not plant roses with a good conscience. It is not good to plant in sodden mud. But after four years of drought, an inch below the surface, the soil is barely moist, despite four inches of rain over the past few days.

I removed two not overly happy camellias: a japonica ('Snow-Chan') and a very sad sasanqua. The japonica would get a second chance in a large pot destined for the patio, where I think it will be happier than the spot it had in too much sun. I collected the pot, the potting soils, and 'Snow-Chan'.



Can't plant it. The pot does not have sufficient drainage holes for a Camellia.

Call subroutine. I got the drill out and slipped in a paddle bit (the best bit for drilling plastic). Can't drill. The battery pack was out of power.

Call subroutine. Get the recharger and plug it in and get the battery recharging, while the sky swelled black with cloud.

Then I went to plant 'Easy Does It' in the Camellia's old spot and couldn't do it. There was a Geranium 'Rozanne' a bit too close to the chosen spot.

Call subroutine. I happened to need another Geranium 'Rozanne' out front, so I dug up 'Rozanne' and took it out front to plant it the chosen spot. Couldn't do it. There was a Hemerocallis, 'Clothed In Glory' a bit too close to the chosen spot.

Call subroutine. I dug up the Hemerocalllis and moved it a bit. Good.

Return to calling function. Now 'Rozanne' can go in. Good.

Return to calling function. Now 'Easy Does It' can go in. Good.

Return to calling function. Now the battery is recharged. Good.

Return to calling function. Now the holes are drilled and 'Snow-Chan' is in her well-drained pot, and there is 2 inches of mud on the soles of my shoes and speckled dots of rain upon the concrete.

The other rose, 'Firefighter', aka 'Red N' Fragrant', aka 'Hacienda', goes into an empty space next to my other copy of 'Firefighter'. This has been my absolute favorite rose of the past two years. Great productivity, sweet delicious fragrance that lasts, superior rust resistance. Also beautiful.



Rain will water the Camellia in, the Hemerocallis, the Geranium, and the two roses, now freed from their plastic prison in the dark. The rain will clean the potting mix off of everything it shouldn't be on, including my nose. And wash away the muddy trail my clomping mudwad shoes left, too.

The sasanqua, forgive me, went into the trash. It had just finished blooming.

I've noticed that any project, work or otherwise, is rarely straighforward (gardening of course is not "work"). You set out to do "A". But before you can do "A" properly, you must first do "B", but before you can do "B", you absolutely have to do "C", and so on, and on, for a while. You have to keep calling those subroutines, then you have to back your way out of them, keeping your mind firmly focused on accomplishing "A". I'm sure it is the same way for distributing aid after an earthquake. There's a lot of stuff you have to do in order to do the thing you need to do. You have to stay focused and keep at it.

Now it's raining again.

Marmara Cambium Miner

Rose pruning continues--briefly. It poured here today for a few hours, then the sun came out, so I got outside and trimed a rose I'm thinking of removing. It's a good rose, but no fragrance, flowers are short-lived, gets huge...so I'm thinking about how much I really need it.

While I was trimming I saw some tunnels of the Marmara cambium miner. This is the larva of a moth that tunnels into the cambium layer of rose stems, leaving grey trails. Most of the damage I see from this pest is on small twiggy stuff that gets trimmed off anyway, so I don't worry about it.



It's clouding up again. More rain on the way.

Rose Pruning Meets Rain

Rose pruning continues. Or it did until yesterday at five minutes past three in the afternoon, when the rain began. We are predicted to get a real El Niño week, meaning several inches of rain within 5 days. After four years of drought I've noticed a few things about what the weather people forecast and what actually happens.

In a drought, rain starts later, and is lighter than the weather people predict. Often predicted rain fails to materialize altogether.

In an El Niño year, rain starts earlier and is heavier than the weather people predict. Sometimes it even rains when it's not predicted.

Yesterday the prediction was for scattered showers after dark. Here, it started around three pm and was fairly steady and widespread. Ergo: El Niño's back! I and every other gardener in Southern California is rejoicing right now.

Pruning will continue when the rain ceases. I'm willing to wait. Weeks, even.
The pile won't increase for a while.




I set up the koi's 600 gallon quarantine tank to use for rainwater storage. After the rain passes and the soil dries out a bit, I'll use this precious rain water on the driest parts of the garden. I'm hoping to completely fill the tank. We'll see if I can.



The roses that I pruned yesterday just before it rained are inside and dry. Now for a few days of activities like baking a cake, and making hot soup, normally things that don't hold much appeal when it's 80F and sunny outside.

Pruning Candelabras

Rose pruning continues. Candelabras are those large multi-branched growths that produce, essentially, a rose bouquet of sorts all on one main stem. When a rose has a lot of pent-up energy, or when the weather is particularly favorable and the water and fertilizer are plentiful, the plant may send up one of these structures. Some roses never produce this type of growth, while for others, it is common.

The question I consider here is: how to prune them.

Candelabras often have a great amount of strong, fresh cane. Good stuff! Plenty of material to provide new flowering growth, right?

Well...sometimes. Sometimes not. The candelabra canes often have very few bud eyes. Bud eyes, found just above the area where a leaf attaches to the stem, are the places where new growth emerges. Here's a cane showing the bud eyes (in rectangles):



No or very few bud eyes means no new or very little new flowering growth. That's a problem. I cut those candelabra structures back to a good bud eye, no matter how low I have to go.

Another problem with a candelabra is that you may have a plant with several other strong healthy canes, all of about four feet in height...and then you have one eight foot tall candelabra, far out of proportion to the rest of the plant.

What to do with that?

The decision there is easy if the plant has several strong healthy young canes besides the much taller candelabra. If I have a desire for a shapely plant, I cut off the candelabra to the point where it's about the height of the other canes.

I would also cut off the entire branched portion of the candelabra if the rose is a variety with weak canes, or if it was in a particularly windy spot, where a top heavy structure would likely be snapped off by a wind storm.

The decision gets tougher from there. What if the plant's best, newest, healthiest cane is only that candelabra? What if the candelabra is full of bud eyes and ready to produce plenty of new flowering growth? There you get into judgment calls, where further thought is helpful. Is the plant going to suffer if it loses all that fresh growth? Can you live with a lopsided plant? Is it a rose that sulks after hard pruning, or does it respond to hard pruning with a burst of new growth? That new growth emerging from a candelabra may produce much smaller flowers than the original candelabra did--is that okay? Is it in a windy spot? Is it planted behind other roses, so that it will be better seen if it is left tall? Do you absolutely have to have those potential flowers, no matter what? And so on. Those are the kind of questions that will tell you where to cut.

As I said, some roses produce a lot of candelabras, while others never do. 'Irish Hope' is the king of candelabras in this garden. Here's a small 'Irish Hope' candelabra. You can see the spent flowers at the tips of the structure:


So you think that is a small, unimpressive candelabra? I agree. But that particular candelabra is a candelabra growing off of one small branch of another far larger candelabra! As I said, 'Irish Hope' is candelabra king.



Fortunately, the plant is placed behind a couple of other roses, so at about 10 feet tall, it is easily seen even behind the other two. It also has the support of the house behind it for those tall canes. They are strong, but being able to lean against the house doesn't hurt.

Rust Rage

Rose pruning continues. When I got to 'Pure Perfume', I became very angry. No, not because of the usual reason for being angry with 'Pure Perfume', which is that it was named by the grower's highly imaginative marketing department--for it has very little perfume, at least in this garden. No, I was angry because 'Pure Perfume' was dripping with Rust. Nacho-Cheese-Dorito covered with Rust. Even the canes were heavily infected, not coated with spores, but oozing their very own orange lesions.

There is Rust here and there in the garden, as is normal for January. But 'Pure Perfume' was disgusting. I now had a serious case of Rust Rage. So I lopped off all the canes and started digging. The rose had to come out.

This proved even more distressing, because I discovered that 'Pure Perfume' had an absolutely magnificent root system. Roots everywhere, healthy, strong roots, feeder roots, anchor roots, all beautiful, all bursting with vigor and energy, all dedicated to supporting--a giant orange pustule.



No those are not all the roots. The roots filled a trash barrel. This is what was left. How I loathe pulling out a perfectly healthy, beautiful rose, a beautiful living thing, the carcass tossed in the trash--oh, wait. Did I say "perfectly healthy"? Okay, okay. I had good reason to pull it out. I still feel bad, but sometimes it is the right thing to do.

I will miss your beautiful flowers, 'Pure Perfume', but not your orange pustules. I don't want to remember you this way:



I want to remember you this way:


But I must keep both pictures, I must remember both. We may have lost a rose--or a loved one--and at first recall so many good memories that the loved one's absence is unbearably painful. Or recall horrible memories that are equally painful. But roses--and people--are a mix of good and bad. No rose is pure perfume, or pure rust.

The intense pain of loss just after the loss occurs gradually smooths and balances out as time inevitably rushes forward and away from this brief moment right here, right now. We remember the beauties, not the flaws, and are devastated by loss, or we remember only the flaws--and feel rage. A rose that is so beautiful in summer time is ripped from the ground in the misery of winter. A rose beautiful in the cool grey of winter may go unseen. Is that wrong? Is that right?

To look clearly is to feel both bad and good, sad and happy. To look clearly is to acknowledge both virtues and vices and see that they ultimately balance out. It is the wise way through the world, the way past Rust Rage.

THE Coprosmas, Pinched

I always think of Coprosmas as "The" Coprosmas. They have a refinement and elegance that demands deference. It is a genus of smallish, slow growing shrubs native to New Zealand. In Southern California, "native to New Zealand" translates instantly into "morning sun, afternoon shade, don't forget to water" if you are away from the immediate coast but still have a good bit of coastal influence, and "doomed" if you are in the desert. Extreme heat and drought won't make them happy. Probably not cold hardy below around 20F. Don't take my word on that. Cold hardy is not a concern here.

Currently on the market are a lot of interesting cultivars with colorful variegated foliage. 'Autumn Glow', 'Rainbow Surprise', 'Tequila Sunrise', 'Roy's Red', and so on. The foliage pinks up quite a bit in the winter months on many of them, adding additional color. In addition to the color variations, the foliage is also extremely glossy, as if it has been given about 6 or 10 coats of lacquer. The gloss itself is another point of beauty. The leaves are small, providing a fine texture.

Growth habit is naturally rangy, lanky, open, even scraggly, but with dedicated pinching, you can create a dense rounded globe. Occasional pruning creates a fuller plant, too, but pinching gives an even denser effect.

Pinching means taking out the very tip of a branch. This changes the structure of the branch from a straight line to a "Y" shape. Repinching and repinching the tips of those "Y"s creates more "Y"s and soon you have--a dense, rounded globe. Plus it's a healthy outlet for the obsessive personality.

Here are some of The Coprosmas, pinked up for winter and obsessively pinched into denseness.

Pruning Climbing Roses I

A story claims that Michelangelo was once asked how he was able to convert a huge marble block into his sculptural masterpiece, 'David'. He replied that he simply removed everything that wasn't 'David'. The big difference between pruning a climbing rose, and creating "David", is that the rose will grow back even if you remove the wrong bit. Michelangelo didn't make mistakes, but since I do, I'll stick with roses. Here's the rose I pruned today: 'Sombreuil'-of-commerce.



"Of commerce" is a fancy plant term meaning "the name everyone uses, even if it is the wrong name". The hard core Old Rose aficionados say the 'Sombreuil' you can buy today is not the original 'Sombreuil' introduced in the 19th century. There was some thought that the 'Sombreuil' you can buy today was a 20th century rose called 'Colonial White', but apparently the person who introduced 'Colonial White' didn't hybridize it, but merely took an old rose everyone had forgotten about, gave it a new name, and sold it as his own creation. What ever the real name might be, it's a beauty.

I spent most of today pruning the smaller of my two 'Sombreuil's. It's a prickly rose, the prickles needle-sharp and well able to pierce a glove. But even canes several years old are still flexible and can be arranged and rearranged.

After I removed this:


The rose now looks like this:


In order to understand how to prune climbing roses, first let us consider the growth structure of a typical climbing rose:

The main stems are called basals These are the canes that come out of the base of the plant. Basals form the main structure of the plant. Think of the basals as analogous to the trunks of a multi-trunked small tree.

This 'Sombreuil' has a lot of basals. (Some in this photo are cut short--more on that in a future post.)


Just as when a small, young tree loses the tip of a trunk, it may be possible to get a continuation of the trunk from a large side shoot growing near the lost tip. This happens with roses as well. Here's a picture of a basal cane with a side shoot that has become the continuation of the basal. The red lines indicate the basal, with the black rectangles indicating where a strong side shoot has taken over the job of containing the basal's structure:


This is important for roses when you want to cover a particular structure, such as an arch or pergola, but the basal cane you are working with isn't long enough to reach over the arch. That new large side shoot can get you the extra length you need.

Now comes the payoff part of the climbing rose structure--the bits that produce the flowers. Climbing roses produce short and longer blooming laterals. These blooming laterals sprout from the basal canes. The basal canes may themselves have a cluster of flowers at their very tip, but that is one flower or one cluster. We all want lots and lots of flowers all over a large climbing rose. Blooming laterals are what produce a massive display of blooms. Maximize laterals to maximize bloom.

Some climbing roses produce a lot of short blooming laterals, like these. Each small side branch had a cluster of flowers at their tips:


Some climbing roses will produce longer laterals, or a mix of short and long. The longer laterals may flowers only at the tips, or first at the tips and then more along the length of the lateral, in subsequent flushes of blooms. Long laterals can potentially become those continuation-of-the-basal canes previously mentioned.


Understanding the growth habit of the climber will take you a long way in knowing how to prune it. Enough for now. More later.