Wherever you are, in spring there comes a time when you should really stop avoiding your rose pruning duties. I don’t know what it is about roses but they seem to give people anxiety. I know I’m not the only one who has worried about doing roses “wrong”. People always stop to watch and learn when we’re working on the roses as if we might reveal the secret handshake. But you don’t have to be a part of a club to grow a pretty rose and even if you don’t obey the “rules”, the Rose Society police won’t arrest you for misconduct. (I’m pretty sure.)

The best time for spring pruning is before the buds have broken and on a mild weather day when all you want is to be outside doing something productive. Pruning when the roses are ready to break dormancy will ensure that all of their fresh energy goes straight into the canes and buds that you’ve decided to keep. Most of the roses we grow in the Rose Garden and North Garden are shrub roses and floribundas and those seem to love a heavy hand in the spring. (New roses only a year or two old prefer a lighter touch.) For instruction on different kinds of roses like climbers and hybrid teas, there are shelves of books written by experts - your local library probably has a ton.

We cut most of our roses back by about a third but I have to admit that once I get going, more like half goes sometimes. Cut out all the dead canes and give your rose the hairy eyeball to determine if any of the more elderly canes should come out as well. Take your time and go cane by cane - If there’s a young healthy cane and an old one side by side - maybe go ahead and take out some or all of the old one to give the new one room to grow. Your rose will tell you what to do - if you cut too far above a bud, you’ll find an ugly dead stub there in a few weeks. Cut too low and the bud might die. If you make your cut at an angle the water will run off rather than pool in the wound (who wants that?). Think about the shape of the rose to come. A lot of roses look their best with plenty of air circulation through the plant. If you cut above buds that face out rather than in, you’ll be helping the plant to not choke itself. (The books will tell you to make a V shape.) Crossed canes are another something to look for and cut out.

When the volunteers and I started this year’s pruning with trepidation, Julie reminded us, “Plants are forgiving”. Don’t be afraid. Even if you stand back and think you just butchered your prize ‘Ballerina’, it will probably reward your brutality by growing gangbusters.

Have you worked on your roses yet? Do you have a heavy hand or light touch?

The roses aren’t the only things in the garden ready to grow. We’ve started cleaning up the perennial beds - it’s much easier to cut back the dead when the new growth is still tight at the crown. And the Daffodils are looking like a few warm days is all it would take to bust out singing. I still think the peak bloom will be on schedule during the events of Daffodil Days but some of the ‘Ice Follies’ might start their show this weekend. (The house opens for the season on April 12; the grounds are open now.)

The Sweet Peas have germinated!! And the cabbages, kale, and onions too! Of all the Sweet Peas only ‘Lilac Ripple’, ‘Chocolate Streamer’ and ‘Blue Streamer’ are lagging behind still snuggly sub-surface.

Beverly, one of the Rockettes, came in this morning to start some more seeds - in earnest now - and Gail was back and forth and up and down like a shooting gallery bear moving plants and trays to make room for all the newbies. Today Bev seeded things like snapdragons, Delphinium, Ammi majus, Lavandula angustifolia ‘Ellagance Sky Blue’ (a dwarf that’s supposed to bloom the first year from seed - we’ll see…), and digitalis, laurentia, limnanthus, asperula and glaucium - most of which I have no memory of ordering but Gail said a lot of them were my must-haves. hmmm…

I still have roses on the brain and am getting really excited about everyone’s suggestions. We’ll be ordering from Heirloom Roses because they have ‘Morning Has Broken’ and I’ve added a couple of Buck’s roses to the list as well as ‘Robusta’, ‘Stanwell Perpetual’ (both recommended by Jodi), ‘Autumn Sunset’ because it’s beeeautiful, and maybe ‘Silver Jubilee’ for the same reason. I also got a very nice email back from Alex Withrow who answered my question about AARS winners being sprayed with fungicide. She said the rule allowing for fungicidal spraying was changed in 2005 but they haven’t yet had any winners under the new conditions. Soon, she says and I hope for all our sakes and the rose growers’ that those winners are well publicized for being extra super-duper. In the meantime she sent this list of roses that she says perform well in the north east:

* Carefree Delight
* Crimson Bouquet
* Julia Child (my personal favorite!) - says Alex
* Knock Out
* Lady Elsie May
* Living Easy
* Rainbow Sorbet
* Memorial Day

Alex ought to know because she grew up in Providence. She said, “[I] have many wonderful memories of Blithewold from my childhood. Thank you for maintaining such a wonderful place!” - That’s just what we love to hear! Thanks, Alex and thank you all for sending your suggestions. (If anyone has more thoughts to share, I’m still listening - always!)

I could use some help. Every year about this time I start thinking about getting new roses for the Rose Garden and every year about this time I go certifiably nutty trying to read between the lines of rose catalog descriptions. My kingdom for a disease resistant rose! Some of you already know that we don’t spray the Rose Garden with any kind of fungicide or pesticide - we clean up dead and disease-y leaves and we handpick beetles (though fingers crossed that the milky spore disease that Dan applied a year and a half ago makes a noticeable difference this year). And we’ve begun to interplant the garden with a mixed up mix of shrubs, perennials and annuals so that there’s other stuff going on midsummer besides black spot and beetles.

Traditionally the Rose Garden was a mixed garden heavy on roses. Word is that the family didn’t spend much time in this garden although they had a beautiful moongate built in 1913 and had tall fences erected (similiar to what surrounded their tennis courts) for the climbers to grow on. And Estelle Clements (Bessie’s live-in companion, friend and helper) mentioned in her journal when her favorite roses were in bloom.

June 10, 1922 Most of the standard roses are in bloom and the ramblers are beginning to come out. Kaiserin Augusta Victoria, Waltham Rambler, Goldfinch, Gardenia are flowering and Thousand Beauties is beginning to come out.

(I love the archives!) But the Rose Garden might have been enjoyed even more by the family’s staff. Situated next to the carriage house and barn (where the family wouldn’t have had much occasion to go), and surrounded in the summer by a thorny fence and stone walls, this private eden would have been the ideal place for a smoke break.

Now it’s our entrance garden - a visitor’s first peek at Blithewold’s 33 acres and we desperately want to make a good impression. –Very difficult to do that with unsprayed roses along midsummer! So we asked one of our favorite (retired) garden designers, Ginny P. to give us her thoughts and I’d like some of yours too. I really want to know if any of you have favorite roses that you don’t treat like roses - do you have any that look good even without weekly hosedown of chemistry? I know you do!… One of the Florabundas (our Thursday Rose Garden volunteers) gave us the most perfect rose last year - and just what I’m looking for more of. ‘Morning Has Broken’ is a beautiful butter yellow non-stopper with a sweet fragrance and best of all - not a spot of fungus amongus all summer! And we had it jammed in with annuals probably stifled and it just never stopped or dropped. We also have the ‘Knock Outs’. They don’t knock my socks off but they do seem to stay healthy. Can you recommend any others before I place my order for a boatload more of ‘Morning ..’?

I checked the All American Rose Selections website for recent winners. Winners are chosen based on a list of characteristics including disease resistance. On the page describing their test gardens I found this: “The rose varities in these trials receive only as much care as your average home gardener would be likely to give. In fact, AARS members recently voted to remove fungicidal spraying from the testing process, to ensure that our AARS Winners are natural top performers.” And I have to admit to being irked. Call me naive but I didn’t realize testers were allowed to spray the roses. Just how exactly can they tell if a rose is disease resistant if they’re spraying it? And when exactly did the fungicide ban go into effect? I couldn’t find that information anywhere on their website and so far no one has gotten back to me. I’ll happily try more AARS winners if I know they won the award fair-n-square. Anybody know the scoop?

Weekends seem so narrow to me that, although I truly love my job (and feel my luck for loving it), I still get slightly whiney Sunday evenings about having to get up the next day (already? so soon?!) and go back to work. What can cut my blues off at the knees though is thinking ahead to how I get to spend my Monday mornings. My friends rib me a little about having slight O.C.D. but I say, yeah-who doesn’t? Good news is, I don’t have to do things like spin around 4 times before leaving the house or wash the skin off my hands. But easing into the work week is easier when I get to do one of my very favorite mindless and obsessive tasks first thing. While Monday volunteer, Diane deadheads and de-beetles the Rose Garden, I compulsively de-leaf blackspotty roses and rake up the debris. I don’t know why I have to do it. Operative words here are “have to”. It’s true that removing diseased foliage from the plant (I knock off loose leaves by shaking and wacking the plants) and raking up around the base of the plant is supposed to keep the roses healthier. (Black spot spreads by a rainsplash release of spores). Whether it really slows the fungal spread or not - and it should - the garden just looks better to me when it’s done. So I guess that’s why I have to do it — it’s for my own personal gratification on a Monday morning (the house is closed Mondays and Tuesdays and there are fewer visitors on the grounds so it really is for mostly me!) I’m not alone in having a favorite obsessive garden chore am I? Care to confess a compulsion? What do you “have to” do in your garden?

Honk if foundation plantings make you cringe! There’s no doubt about it, it’s difficult to live in the world and not at least have a neighbor with Yertle the Turtle style bubble shrubberies flanking their front door. (I love Dr. Seuss!…) But there’s definitely a trick to creating a foundation planting that doesn’t say “Hello, folks - I’m a foundation planting!” I can’t claim to know any of the tricks (am currently a shrubbicidal maniac at my own house with no permanent plans for the bare places yet) but I suspect it might be important to think of the house as a garden ornament rather than just a great big thing that the garden bumps up against.

The above editorial is by way of introducing a new planting that Fred and Dan are working on today! The bed right in front of the front door porch was in need of rehab. The Bonica roses were fired (although they were about to peak beautifully, peak has always been followed by peaked) and are being replaced by Daphne burkwoodii, Spirea thunbergii ‘Ogon’ and Picea pungens ‘Glauca Procumbens’. The guys were a little worried that I might claim credit … maybe because they used one of my favorite color schemes… (Notice the colors in the pot on the porch - that I planted… hmmmm…) Anyway, what they came up with for that bed is exciting because it shows that creative use of color and texture doesn’t detract from the house - it enhances it!

In other news, I’m practicing patience. I have to stop myself from bouncing up and down in front of all the recently planted annuals and tender perennials saying, “Grow! Grow now!” Pretty soon the Nicotiana sylvestris which are still only the size of ritz crackers will be a respectable 5 feet tall. Pretty soon. And the dahlia/grass bed will look abundant one day… All in good time…

The guys have just about finished with “phase 1″ of the Display Garden redesign. Gail and I really didn’t know how they were going to deal with a tricky grading issue in the last bed (the last new bed for this season - more later!) and only got half a clue of what they were up to when they started delivering stones. They worked out a way to terrace the slope with sizable stones dug out the deep elsewhere on the property, gave us perfectly spaced steps for working within the bed and created a mini megalithic structure just for the fun of it. Gail and I have been hoarding plants for the day we can finally plant the bed and even though we thought we were exhausted and creatively drained — we’re not! It’s like getting a blank canvas and new paints and finding that the muse was just waiting at the easel. Our new baby bed should start to take shape with volunteers’ help by the end of the week. It’ll just need a name…

Gail started the greenhouse exodus on Tuesday - the container bed is starting to take shape. Every year is new and different even with the same plants. One of my favorite things is finding transformation in repotting a world-weary specimen and finding new companions for it in the container garden.

The roses are coming! — the roses are coming! Here are a couple of new ones — it’s too early to tell if they’re going to be all around winners but they’re ahead right now! Rosa ‘Fourth of July’ is a climber and particularly perfect for Bristol, RI (home of the oldest 4th of July parade in the country). And Rosa ‘Champlain’ is a gorgeous red-red.

And a not quite new favorite: Rosa mutabilis is a delicate color shifter. It’s marginally hardy here but our 3 roses have taken moves and cold winters in stride.

A couple more photo worthies today: The Allium bulgaricum and Amsonia hubrectii in the North Garden horseshoe and a pair of frogs chilling out by the big pond this morning. (It was chilly!)

Gail and I need a good catch-up day in the greenhouse and the rain is forcing us to stay in and get to it! There are seedlings that still need transplanting (poor stretched out, pack-bound little things…) and plants to pot up for our sale table (open daily at the visitor’s center — bring $5s and $10s and $20s for the honor box) and pinching back to do and weeding and deadheading and tidying the potting shed and and… !

It’s also a great day for the new and improved Rose Garden to settle in. Yesterday we and the Floribundas planted 2 dozen new shrubs and 11 new roses (in 2 and a half hours!). For years the Rose Garden has struggled through humid summers and tough winters and although it’s always beautiful during its June peak, after that it gets to looking like “black-spot on a stick” (I can’t remember who said that but I know I can’t claim it). We can no longer allow the first garden that visitors see to be anything but stunning every day. The problem is that the garden has too many roses and not enough other stuff! A mixed garden is a healthier garden (everything in moderation! - A rule that applies where ever obsessions reside.) So Gail has come up with a design that is heavy on fragrant shrubs and has planned for a scent rotation from spring to fall - Lonicera fragrantissima, March-April; Daphne x burkwoodii, Daphne transatlantica, Viburnum carlesii ‘Compactum’, May; roses, June; Clethra alnifolia ‘Sixteen Candles’, Buddleia davidii ‘Adonis’ and Buddleia davidii ‘Petite Indigo’, July. Old fashioned heliotrope will waft it’s grandmotherly comfort scent as soon as it’s safe to plant it (soon) through the season to a light frost, and we’ve got Datura and Nicotiana sylvestris waiting in the wings for their gorgeous August evening perfumes. My contribution to the overall design (besides saying “mmm that sounds perfect!”) was suggesting planting three Pinus strobus ‘Blue Shag’ because I love the little blue muffins (I could have baker’s dozen!) and thought the garden could use a 4 season living rock-formation.

I also spent some time with the Sylvan Nursery catalog choosing a new round of high-hopes roses. Last year we got some Knock Outs and we understand now what all the fuss was about. Personally I like to do a little rose maintenance now and then because I find the challenge perversely gratifying. We didn’t touch the Knock Outs all summer -just to see what they would do - and they bloomed on and on and the foliage never looked terrible. This year we’re trying ‘Home Run’ - another one that’s over marketed for being (too) easy; Carefree Beauty, Delight and Wonder (the names say it all!) - these are Bucks roses which were bred in Iowa by a Griffiths Bucks who selected for toughness and vigor; Rosa ‘Champlain’ which is one of the Canadian Explorer Series - known for hardiness and disease resistance; Rosa ‘Angel Face’, reputed to be very fragrant and disease resistant as well as an AARS winner; Rosa ‘Betty Boop’ (if it’s half as cute as it’s namesake, I’ll be happy) and climber ‘Fourth of July’ (because Bristol is home of the oldest 4th of July parade) - both AARS winners. So cross your fingers for us and with any luck I’ll have success stories to share (although sometimes failure stories are funnier…)

In other news, just a quick note (because today is the day I wish I had about ten rain barrels filling up at my house): Rhode Island has its very own “Water Lady” who buys barrels in bulk and passes the cheaper-by-the-dozen savings onto anyone willing to pay ahead and pick them up at her house in South County. Sounds like an excellent reason for a road trip to me! The barrels she buys are big, attractive and half the price of buying retail not even counting shipping! It’s water-wise and wallet-wise. Click here for more information.

We are asked - fairly frequently - what do we do to make our gardens grow so lusciously? - What do we use for fertilizer? Our answer “not much” is hard for fellow Rhode Islanders and New Englanders to believe. When we really want to push plants along, we use Neptune’s Harvest Fish Fertilizer which is OMRI listed organic. We also add Electra to the potting soil we use for our container plants and we feed the Rose and North Garden roses with Electra once a year. We’re lucky because our gardens are blessed with dreamy dark fluffy cake mix soil - only a mile and a half down the road at my own house, I can’t jump on a digging fork without a teeth rattling bounce against a pile of rocks embedded in clay. These gardens though, have been under cultivation - ornamental and otherwise - for almost 100 years - just think if your own garden had been annually ammended with compost and an arboretum’s worth of leaves…

The plight of the honey bee has been all over the news lately (Colony Collapse Disorder) and with garden chemicals being one of the possible causes, we all (I’m editorializing) should really think long and hard about how our choices impact the eco-system. For years now, Gail and I have refused to use chemistry on our infested roses - not only would our visitors and volunteers be in constant contact with it, but the beneficial insects and organisms would suffer. So we have plucked spotty yellow leaves and squished aphids and drowned Japanese beetles in soapy water. Last fall, Dan (one of our groundsmen) applied Milky Spore to several patches of lawn for beetle grub control. We’re crossing our fingers that that works! And instead of fighting a losing battle with blackspot - if the only way to win is with destructive chemistry or a weekly regiment of organic solutions that we haven’t got the time to apply - we’re raising the white flag, taking out some of the most disease prone roses and starting to interplant the rest with a healthy-garden mix of shrubs, perennials and annuals. Why fight it? (and don’t get me wrong - I love roses!)

In a nutshell (and there’s so much more to say but the greenhouse beckons - there’s a plant somewhere in there rasping, “waaater… cough.. cough … I’m thiiiiirsty…”), I think Blithewold’s gardens are gorgeous because we try to make sure our choices are healthy for everyone - creepy crawly or otherwise.

If I’ve raised more questions - please ask them!

The gardens have all had their spring clean-up and Julie, Gail and I even got to the Rose Garden’s east side climbing roses today! Pruning climbers isn’t rocket science but it’s definitely tricky and totally stickery! Each plant was thinned out to a half dozen or so newer canes and those canes were cut way back, arched slightly and retied to the fence. The climbers might not flower a whole lot this year, but next year’s show should be outstanding! (Sometimes patience is a virtue.)

So we’re ready to open - but the weather - ugh. Check the forecast. It looks like Saturday is this weekend’s best bet. The Daffodils are waiting for a little more heat before they strut their stuff, but the upside is you won’t be distracted from seeing other things quietly waking from a long (long) winter’s nap!

Yesterday was a lone decent-ish day in the middle of a whole bunch of dirty ones - with more ick on the way in the form of sleet, rain, wind and are they really forcasting snow?! So the Wednesday Rockettes and some flexi-schedule Thursday Florabundas spent a full morning cutting back and tidying up 3 of Blithewold’s gardens so that we could say “we’re ready!” for opening. If you can stand the cold (rain, wind, sleet and other early spring treats), late March to early April is a great time to cut back your perennials. They haven’t grown much yet (at least here they haven’t) and we could really cut close to the crown without beheading the new stuff coming up. (I can’t stand to see sticks, nubs, stubs in the spring -or any- garden. It’s a compulsion almost worthy of medical attention. I also can’t handle bent spoons. Call me wacky.) The North Garden looked like this a week ago and now, although it’s super quiet, it’s super tidy!

They (who?- does anyone know?) say roses should be spring pruned before the Forsythia blooms. I saw only the before and after in the Rose Garden and the contrast was so dramatic I became all screechy with amazement. Last week I stood in front of a thicket of climbers that looked like this

and this
with pruners poised but totally incapable of decision! Now, after a morning with a couple of people who are able to commit, the climbers on the west side look

like this.

I wish I had been there to see and apprentice to the masters at work. Julie calmly said, “You just get a feel for where to cut. It’s probably not done correctly…” Maybe a militant rosarian would scold, but looks pretty perfect to the rest of us, doesn’t it?