Roses, The Regenerative Power of Nature

These three photographs were taken in July 2021.

When we moved into this house in June 1997, a neighbour remembered the previous owner for her garden. I am not sure that she was accurate, there was very little sign that any gardening had gone on here. But there were two rose bushes behind the house; I am told that the way to get roses to bloom is to feed them, make sure they are in the sun, and in the fall to cut them back to about two feet from the ground and wrap them for the winter or cover them with mulch. I did none of these. Time passed, years passed, and these two rose bushes survived my neglect; they didn't thrive but they didn't die. I found a plastic label for one of the roses in the earth, they are Tea Roses; I know so little about roses that, to me, their flowers don't even look like roses.

Then, a few years ago, I began to work on the backyard garden and I called it a Canadian cottage garden as distinct from the much loved English country garden. I noticed that the two rose bushes, planted by the previous owner, were still alive; I bought and planted a third rose bush even though I've never had much luck with roses. I am not, I guess, a rose person... Early last spring, 2021, one of the two original rose buses looked as though it had died; I tried to dig it up but I was lazy and gave up on it; that rose bush was more tenacious than I realized. For a few weeks the two surviving rose bushes thrived, I've never had so many roses! Then, one day, I noticed a neighbour's roses, they were incredibly abundant and remained so all summer and, even yesterday, they had flowers although now covered with the first frost of the season. My roses lasted a few weeks, died, and that was the end of them; my neighbour's roses bloomed all summer and fall. Looking at the photographs of my roses leaves me wondering what kind of roses they are. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the rose bush I thought had died was still alive, it had survived the previous winter, it had survived my neglect. Well, what do you know? All three rose bushes are now alive; I will wrap them with burlap for the winter and look after them better in the future.

Here is part of a longer quotation from Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel, Autumn, in which he mentions the regenerative power of nature: "Life is so robust, it seems to come cascading, blind and green, and at times it is frightening." Written after he hacked away at an apple tree, then was concerned that he might have killed the tree, and a few months later had more apples than ever before. Despite everything, nature affirms life. And this is one of the things that gives me hope, no matter what terrible things people do to the world, to Earth, nature will soon return and reclaim what we have leveled, built on, destroyed, polluted, and desecrated.

These three photographs were take in July 2020, also an excellent garden summer.

Fall planting of hostas

We've had a mild October this year, it was +20 C yesterday and most of the previous two weeks; however, it is raining today (on Saturday) and the coming days will be in the +10 C range. This means it's been great weather to get out and work in the garden, in my case moving or transplanting hostas. One of the advantages of perennial plants is that they are perennial, you buy them once and not only do you have them year after year, but they multiply, and then you can divide them and have more of the same plants; plus, you buy them only once so you aren't paying for them a second or third summer. Perennials are the gift that keeps on giving... Frugality is something the government of Canada needs to learn as we are now half way to a trillion dollar debt. Meanwhile, annuals look great for one summer and then, in October, they end up in the compost or the garbage; I've seen piles of geraniums thrown out, still in bloom, they could easily have been overwintered indoors and planted the following spring. 

    About five years ago I planted four hostas in the front of the house, as a border to the walk, as well as other hostas planted in the backyard; I decided to move two of these plants to the back yard garden and that's what I did last week. In fact, I also moved a few other hostas into this same long row at the very rear of the garden, it has the effect of pulling the whole garden together. This backyard, my Canadian cottage garden, is not very large and it doesn't get a lot of sunlight except where the house abuts the backyard and even what sunlight I get isn't guaranteed, it depends on the time of day; in other words, nowhere does this garden get twelve straight hours of summer sunlight on a single day as do the gardens of some of my neighbours. I don't have a great love for hostas; I like hostas, but... so, planting these hostas was a matter of convenience and even necessity, it is all that will grow where I planted them; also, they are perennials and there are many varieties of hostas, they will grow and flourish in the shade and I like them well enough. 

You can see where two hostas have been removed, they were the same size as the hostas on either side of the remaining hostas; by the way, hostas are easy to dig up, even four or five years after first planting them the root ball was more or less intact. It is also easy to divide the root ball prior to transplanting them.

Here we see the row of hostas only half planted; this is very poor soil and it's beside some cedars and below an apple tree, so not the greatest place to grow anything.

Here is the completed row of hostas, they'll look better next year or the year after next. It was only after planting them that I realized how they completed the garden; the hostas gave a sense of enclosure to the garden as a whole, a sense of completion. 

I planted these hydrangeas and the hostas in the foreground last summer when I also dug this small island in the backyard. It isn't a lot of work to dig up small sections of grass and, one thing I've noted, is that an island also creates green space surrounding it, it creates paths. I enlarged this area this summer and, recently, I moved the hostas further away from the hydrangeas. By the way, the hydrangeas were moved from the front lawn area where they were too plentiful. I don't throw out any plants or bushes.