Life is … A Bed of Roses!

I love roses, especially fragrant ones. So it was no surprise to my husband when I planned out a rose bed for one of my first gardening projects. And plan I did! The area that is our new Rose Garden was simply grass last year. I marked out the area I wanted with layers of newspapers and added compost and seaweed on top, and a few stones to keep the papers in place. I then left it alone for the grass to break down. As for the next step of picking a border, I have to say that there is something about boxwood plant borders that I really like. I think it is the functionality of the plant! So boxwood is what we went with (as soon as it went on sale locally). The garden had quite a few months of really not looking all that pretty, I have to admit. This doesn’t bother me as long as I have a clear vision of what it is going to look like in the long run!

Last fall I decided that tulips would be a nice flower to have in the rose garden. I planted bulbs and then covered everything up with some local horse manure (see my previous post: https://mominthegarden.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/laying-down-manure/). Some of the tulips are up now (Blueberry ripple & Innuendo). I’m still waiting on a few double late tulips. I was all ready to plant some roses this weekend so I gave the garden a really good digging through! I used my hoe and mixed in/up/around everything! It’s a good thing I love gardening, because this was some seriously hard work! This was it, I was finally ready to call it a garden bed. We planted 3 Rosa Jacques Cartier roses (what a fancy name!), and then 3 roses with names not nearly as exciting. My husband and I have a little debate going on. The debate is whether or not it is worth buying special (read “expensive”) roses via catalogue, or are the inexpensive “sale” ones just as good. We’ll have to wait until this summer to find out which roses are the winners!

How about you, which do you prefer? Buying through the catalogue or locally? I’d love to know!

Dana