Flowers on the brain.

Blush Noisette

With just 7 days until we are married, I seem to have flowers on the brain. I have been spending more time than usual in the garden, tending to my roses. I keep thinking about the wedding flowers, which for our wedding means peonies. It's very unfortunate for me that peonies just cannot grow in hot, humid Florida, because when I lived in North Carolina, although I never actually grew any of my own, they grew happily there. Except people there pronounced it pee-YOH-knee (rhyming with baloney). Peonies, along with forsythias, were always a welcome sign of Spring. But, we can't grow them here, so I grow what does grow well here, instead. And remember that I never had tangerine blossoms outside my bedroom window when I lived in North Carolina, either.

No peonies, so old Southern roses it is. Just try to kill them, drought. You won't. Neither will black spot, or aphids, or lack of fertilizer. Old Southern roses are so effortless and content just to be, they almost make no peonies okay.

Natchitoches noisette, one of my pink Noisettes, photographed at dusk:


I like to look at my roses at different times of day. Early morning and close to dusk are best, when the foliage is not wilted, and everything looks fresh.

Madame Alfred Carriere a climbing Noisette, at dusk:


We have had so little rain lately that our rain barrels are now bone-dry. I have resorted to paying for City water to run the little portable sprinkler in order to soak their roots deeply. I do water them when it's really dry, because even tough, hardy plants suffer from extended drought. It was 94 degrees in the shade at the Cottage today.

Let's hope for a nice, Spring-like day next Saturday!