After the rain, the setting sun gave the sky a warm (or maybe just weird) buttery glow. Great for photography?  You decide.


The Rose Pergola is canopied by (duh) a rose—Eddie's Jewel. Dunno who Eddie is, but I hope he/she is proud regardless, because Eddie's Jewel itself is proud. Obstreperously, poke-you-in-the-ribs, ef-you-if-you-can't-take-it proud. Pink beyond delicate or babylike, clear to vibrating boing-your-eyes intensity.
Proud indeed.


Cleaving to pink doesn't come naturally for me, and yet here it is, on the crossroads of the entire property no less. It was an accident. Eddie starts out red, cherry red but still red, and that's how the nursery (Heronswood) describes it, "brilliant single red flowers" they rightfully rave.
And they have the picture to prove it.I've been to Heronswood when it was out near Seattle, seen Eddie in bloom, and brilliant single (cherry) red is the truth.
But with East Coast heat, cherry red was so Yesterday. Today? Easter Peeps Pink. The only choice is to celebrate the fabulousness, be it bad taste or good. Pink & Proud.



Here's the pergola from the other direction, looking back to the house.
Proud.


From farther West:
Still proud.


From still farther West:

Prouder still.


And so Eddie's Jewel is, by accident, and even better choice to say "Here's the important spot!" because she uses both intensity and a questionable color—and a whole lot of it—for the announcement. If Eddie were merely cherry red and profuse and proud, he/she wouldn't be nearly as effective, as exciting. And, I say, enough with this he/she stuff; I'm declaring that Eddie's a girl, a big-bosomed but genial Amazon mama. Or perhaps even more likely, a very tall drag. In either case, Eddie's a "she", a "her", from now on.
If you need to cover a structure with a rose, Eddie's got much to recommend her. Very quick growing—I've had canes get to twelve feet in a season—and yet still with some sense of boundary and restraint. If Eddie gets to sixteen or eighteen feet, that will be all I could ever want or need from her. Other cover-your-garage roses don't know when to call it a day, and can get to twenty, thirty feet and more. That's your garage and your neighbor's.


Here was Eddie's canopy coverage the Summer before last: Only a few of the canes were well placed enough to be tied to the frame.
Another year and I expect that Eddie will have covered completely The Rose Pergola will be, for a few weeks at least, the biggest pinkest picture hat in New England.

June is inevitably a month of roses even if you don't fixate on them by having a Rose Garden. Which I don't: I've never ever seen a Rose Garden that wasn't a cacophony of color, a juvenile confetti of Me-Me-Me flowers jangling together by the thousands. Impressive but unattractive.
Better to grow roses as part of more diverse plantings. The Rule Of Thumb?

                             Never (well, almost) Plant One Rose Anywhere Near Another.
Then each rose has the proper respect, the big-enough and bland-enough retinue around and behind it, so it can be the star it was born to me. (And truly, what plant than a rose has higher expectations of being a star when in full-bloom? OK, rhododendrons, azaleas, peonies, iris. The Rule Of Thumb applies for them too.)


Here then, is one of my favorite star-quality roses, Dortmund. Countless single-red flowers on canes that, for me, can get ten feet tall and beyond. I've grown it up a ten-foot section of rebar (the reinforcing rod that is normally used to make reinforced-concrete frames) that I pounded into the ground a couple of feet. (A good mallet is a marvelous thing.)


And each Dortmund flower has a large white center, a distinctive as well as delightful touch.
The biggest show is in June, but there are sporadic follow-ups in August too.


Dortmund is a climber, not a rambler, so each cane can live for many years, getting thicker and trunkier and more floriferous all the while. So unlike ramblers (where the new canes that spring up from the base are essential to replace the older canes that begin to poop out after a couple of years), you only need to keep new Dortmund canes if you need a bulkier bush.
Otherwise just snip them right off.  Dortmund is defiantly thorny, so wear gloves if you don't want to bleed a lot.

My Goldfinch rose the real star of Dirt's profile shot.
How have I not posted on this marvelous rose until now? My apologies to Goldfinches everywhere.


Goldfinch is an easy and enthusiastic rambler, with a once-a-year performance so happy, so glad-to-greet-the-world.


All it wants is plenty of sun and any decent well-drained soil. The canes are almost thorn-free—flexible too—so it's just as easy to swerve them back and forth between the top teeth of a picket fence as it would be to fan them out onto a South or West-facing wall.
The flowers are small but plentiful; I just love how the buttery color intensifies at the base of the petals.
But for reasons of their own they are not satisfied with this performance. When you're a Goldfinch, you have higher standards. By the next day the petals have become pure white...

...with only a faint reminder of yesterday's yellow at the base.


Because the flowers continue to open for several weeks, you can enjoy flowers in all stages of the transition at the same time.  Goldfinch is a happy-to-share rose indeed. And did I say easy too? Right after the bloom is, literally, of the rose, cut back any canes, all or in part, that are somehow not what you want where you want. Cut out a couple of the oldest canes too, right to the bottom. This makes it easier to encourage and control the new canes that you'll find are now springing up right from the base. As with all ramblers, these new kids-on-the-bush are the most glad-to-see-you. Do right by them the first season, and they'll return the favor by blooming like hell the next.

Rosa roxburghii is on my must-grow list time after time.
The single flowers (hooray!), large and in pale pink (ugh), are the least of the appeal for me.
But by blooming, the bush shows that it's happy, which is its own satisfaction regardless of the aesthetics. For my money, this rose is essential for overall form.
It's a monster of a bush—even here at the Zone-6 bottom of its range—getting ten feet tall and fifteen wide. But the real value of that size is that it's achieved via canes that get as thick as saplings. And so the rose can be trained up into a small tree, as I've done here.

So-called "tree" roses aren't generally hardy this far North: the trunk is grafted onto the rootstock, and the bushy and blooming top portion is grafted onto the trunk. One portion or another always fails in a New England Winter.

A tree-rose form of Rosa roxburghii, though, is the same individual top to bottom, bloom to root. And the trunk gets thick enough (at least over time), that the tree can be truly self-supporting too. It's a unique talent in hardy roses.


The ferny leaves are a classy texture when the blooms are done.
The bush is once-blooming only—a plus for me but a disappointment for those of you who actually like pink.

I cut back any branches that grow too far outside the general globe, and I adjust the stake so that the entire structure doesn't topple in some now-that-global-warming-is-really-here freak blizzard or ice-storm. But in time, this tree-rose will be stake-free and on its own, proud and pretty.

I've planted mine in one of my street-side beds, which would never happen if the plant in question weren't a year-round asset. Look for it if you visit Rhode Island: Mine is the only Rosa roxburghii tree in the state.

Such a multi-talented rose:
—Delicate four-petal white flowers with a bouncy, darker-hued levitating poof of pistols in the center.  (I didn't say big four-petal white flowers, though.  An inch and a half, tops.)
—Inch-and-a-half leaves with minute leaflets so small they look ferny.
—Burgundy-pink action at the base of the leaves......which is the protective scale that had covered the young leaf through the Winter. By happy accident, it's chatting nicely with the burgundy of the cut-leaf Japanese maple in the background.
All tidy, tiny, and tame. Those aren't cursewords for me, but still, I have my limits. And indeed, the real reason I grow this rose is because it has such a counter-intuitively ferocious and colorful Winter show.
Thanks to rainyside.com, take a look at this:
Those unique, scarlet, translucent thorns are on eager new canes, just sprouted that Spring, that have yet to leaf out. They'll catch the low Winter sunlight with wierd talent.
When they leaf out the next Spring, their thorns will have dulled completely, as on the older cane at the center.
To grow a rose for the flowers is normal. To nod to appealing leaves is the next deeper level of sophistication. To grow a rose for the thorns that look particularly blood-thirsty in Winter when the bush is leafless and the wind is howling? Morticia Addams would be proud.
My red-spined rose is just getting it's head together, and is just barely big enough and old enough to bloom, yes. Maybe this season it will grow some new canes energetically enough that they'll sport the red spines this coming Winter. Those new canes can be encouraged by pruning the entire bush hard right after flowering. This maximizes the Winter show, but because it also removes the older canes, which have the flowers, there would be no Spring bloom to follow. Morticia would be proud of that too. My fantasy is to grow this rose as a standard, by cutting all the branches that grow out of a single point at the top of one main trunk back to that same point—and yes, right after flowering. No flowers, but what a Winter show. Morticia, I'm shoulder-to-shoulder with you: Thorns trump flowers. Bloodthirsty is better than pretty. Ferocious is more fabulous than tame.