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Welcome to my backyard! Come with me and I'll take you on a stroll around the rose gardens. Please don't feel it necessary to stoop down and pick the weeds that you'll see here and there. I'll get to them. Weeds are a problem here - just as I've picked what I thought was the last one, there are new ones popping up where I started. Oh, and don't look too hard and the grass along the edges - the grass trimmer is on the fritz.
If you want to stop and take a better look at something, just click on the picture and a 4 by 6 inch picture will appear.
We'll start off here on the back porch looking south. There's
Jeanne LaJoie,
my "miniature" climbing rose. If you look carefully, you can see the
bird feeder in the middle of her. Out beyond her you my two dogs -
the horizontally challenged Boris and the lean and tall Natasha.
note - Natasha died September, 1997.
If you just look at little to the right of Jeanne LaJoie, you will
see my center rose garden.
This is where I keep my Hybrid Teas,
miniatures,
English Roses as well as some other roses that don't
get too big. It contains over 200 roses, mostly miniatures.
Contruction on it began in 1982, with the laying of the brick paths. This garden is shaped like a 40 foot diameter wagon wheel, with 6 brick path "spokes" radiating from the center. While the paths were being put into place, underground pvp pipe was laid so that water could get to the drip system that was to be put in place for each "wedge" between the "spokes". Each section was dug out about two feet deep, with half of the soil removed being mixed with horse manure, alfalfa, peat moss, Metro Grow (Denver Area processed sewage), triple super phosphate or bone meal, and put back into the hole.
That first summer the two northern most wedges were populated with roses moved from my old house. We started populating the last two wedges in the summer of 1995.
Walking down one of the paths, you see the bright pink miniature
Valery Jean, then Anita Charles, next to the orangey Orange Honey.
The larger red flower belongs to one of my Hybrid Tea seedlings.
Here we see a couple of more miniatures. I have no idea what the
red one is, having picked it up about 8 years earlier for $2.00
with a label that just said "red". I love it though, with its
nice bushy plant habit and fragrance. Next to it is the yellow
and red bicolor Tracy Wickham.
The second part of the tour of the yard
