Masquerade

Wow, the weather has been way too nice to stay inside and blog. In truth, I have been really busy with the kids but I've found time to do a bit of gardening too.
My roses have blackspot which I wasn't too worried about but some of them seem to be really badly affected and have lost most of their leaves so I have decided to spray them. I don't really like using chemicals and spraying roses seems a bit futile to me as the blackspot always comes back but I'm hoping that if I spray them hard this year that they might recover enough to make it to next year in better shape. Then I will sort the men from the boys and get rid of all the sickly roses and replace them with something stronger.
One that I am going to take cuttings of is this climber.

It is the cleverest rose I have ever met in that its flowers change colour. The buds are red and yellow, they then turn peachy as they open. The older flowers are a deep pink. You end up with a plant covered in different coloured flowers. Very cool. I actually thought there was something wrong with it at first but my friends over at Gardeners Corner tell me it is called Masquerade!

Roses Galore

I'm not really a huge fan of roses. I find them slightly intimidating, all that pruning and feeding, blackspot and powdery mildew to worry about. They are also expensive so I have never bought one. However, this garden is full of them and its hard not to be impressed. I am of course still worried. Most of them seem to be Hybrid Teas or Floribundas (I only know that because some of them still have their labels) with the odd climber. I arrived a little too late to prune them properly so I just removed all the dead bits, fed them and tied them in where necessary. I will just have to see how they do this year and keep my eye on my favourites. I was thinking of taking some cuttings of the good ones later on in the year.

This is a climber called 'Golden Showers' - who thinks up these names?

This wins the prize for the biggest flowers

And this one the prize for brightest colour

This one has lots of big blooms on one bush. It's a very girly pink and reminds me of my Grandma. She would have loved it.

This is probably my favourite. It's a climber and its such an amazing purple colour. It was the first to bloom despite being hidden behind an overgrown shrub. It has a lovely scent too.

I like this romantic, soft focus picture of this yellow rose. It is a lovely neat bush that has lots of blooms.

There are lots of buds everywhere so lots more roses to look forward too. Now all I have to do is figure out what a sucker looks like and how to remove it!