ROSES TRIUMPHANT

The brilliant greening of spring has finally drawn to an artful close as June begins and the gardens here at the farm push towards full throttle mid-summer madness. It's a slightly an in-between time, with only a few perennials (salvia, early astilbe, the last of the baptisia) adding sparkle to the borders, and the mock oranges and deutzias picking up the post-azalea slack a bit in the wooded areas. However, on full tilt, magnificent display right now are roses everywhere I turn my head, and it is a few of these I choose to share with you this month.



As much as I admire them, I eye roses with a slightly jaundiced eye as so many of them can be whiney and tempermental if they're not sufficiently coddled and cosseted, and anyone who has weathered the devestations of an onslaught of Japanese beetles will thoroughly understand a certain amount of hesitancy on my part. Yet, that said, there are plenty of rose types that seem to be doing swimmingly here on the farm right now with only a modicum of maintenance or consideration.



Our most magnificent must surely be the white "Bobbie James" rambler, with a multiple trunk the size of a small grove of saplings, that climbs a Boulevard Cypress in the perennial borders. Planted nearly twenty years ago now, it has consumed the cypress, which it uses for all intents as a servicable tuteur. It's been so successful, that we've planted more "Bobbie James" and "Wedding Day" on the other three of the quartet of cypresses puctuating the middle of the borders, and will simply allow them to consume their proprietary trees as well.



Rivaling it at the top of the pine and dogwood allee must surely be the immense pink shrub rose (name forgotten)that inhabits the 18 foot tall urn that is the visual punctuation point there. The whole affair must be twenty-five feet tall on its stone plinth, which is alot of rose. In the nearby lane to the Italian Garden, Fairy Roses dance above stands of Nepeta and commingle with Pink Carpet Rose, and, in the perennial borders, a quartet of Pink Fairy Roses enliven their space, with white shrub roses cascading on the post and rail fences behind them.



On the side of the chicken house, the marvelous old-fashioned hybrid musk "Sally Holmes" spreads her charms above the herb garden, and, in the French Garden, the 1930 heirloom "New Dawn" is scrambling up the rose hoops around the perimeter of the garden, encircling the box-edged parterre beds in a happy blush of color.



Down below the terraces on the south side of the house, a bevy of the incredibly easy care and long-blooming new Pink "Knock Out" roses are strutting there stuff. A tough and hardy shrub type, Pink Knock Outs are blissfully drought and mildew tolerant, blackspot resistant, and will continue blooming right until first frost.



But my favorits must surely be the exquisite David Austin rose "Sweet Juliet", also currently in bloom down below the terraces. An almost peony-like peachy blossom flushed with yellow, it has the most ethereal, sweet, lemony scent imaginable, and I have cut armloads to lavish our rooms right now. Surely, roses can be a trial to culture but, equally surely, they are one of the garden season's most intoxicating triumphs.