The Cat Lives On.....

I write a regular contribution to the monthly newsletter of the Otago Rose Society. Although I undertook some time ago to reproduce these contributions as blogposts here, I haven't been very good at doing so. Anyway, here's the most recent of them.

The summer before last I visited the Lady Norwood Rose Garden in the Wellington Botanical Gardens. I would recommend such a visit to any member with time to spare when in Wellington during the warmer months. I recall admiring two beds of roses in full bloom, one being ‘Tropical Skies’ and the other a variety whose name has slipped my mind, to my annoyance. I walked from one of these beds to the other several times trying unsuccessfully to discern a difference between them.

                            

   Lady Norwood Rose Garden, Wellington

Last week I took delivery of a small consignment of bare-rooted roses (from D & S Nurseries) which included ‘Tropical Skies’ and it has been planted over the remains our beloved cat, whose 15 year life ended on the day the roses arrived. For the record, ‘Tropical Skies’ was bred by Dutch breeder Peter Ilsink and introduced in 1997. It is a pink and yellow HT which I hope will prove as impressive as the Lady Norwood bed of the same variety. It’s up to you, Puss!

Dunedin Botanic Garden has a rose that I have long admired, called ‘Modern Art’ (HT, Poulsen, Denmark 1985). I’ve given up trying to find the variety in garden centres and growers’ catalogues, so I turned on the charm and politely asked Linda (the curator) for some prunings recently. Being the lovely, obliging person that she is, Linda came to the party and I was able to walk away with sufficient propagating wood from which to get about 20 nice cuttings. Having trimmed them appropriately I plunged half of them into a pot of pumice, which is how I usually strike cuttings. With the other half, I tried something I’ve never done before, but which I discovered on YouTube recently. Having dipped the ends in a rooting hormone, I bundled them up together in a supermarket bag with the rooting ends wrapped in damp newspaper, rolled the package up in several other bags and secured the complete package. The proponent of this method was adamant that roots would be evident when I check in six or seven weeks’ time. I’ll be happy if a couple of them oblige!

A splash of colour

Color coordination is not one of my strong suits, as I am reminded from time to time - usually when we contemplate changes to our interior decor. But in the garden, I get to call the shots and if I say so myself, I don't think I did too badly in this instance!

Gilding the Rose

As I promised recently, here is another in the series of contributions I have been writing for the Otago Rose Society's monthly newsletter.

With an Ashes cricket series in progress, this tale of two cricketers, one an Australian and the other an Englishman, is topical, albeit that only the Australian was an international player of renown while his English counterpart, born 96 years earlier, was but an enthusiastic village cricketer.  

The Englishman, Joseph Hardwick Pemberton, was born into a well-to-do family in 1852, and lived his entire life of 73 years in his ancestral family home in the village of Havering-atte-Bower, Essex. His happy childhood days were reportedly made even happier by playing in the large garden with informal winding paths overgrown with shrubs and punctuated by numerous old roses grown by his grandmother.  It was there that young Joseph’s love of roses germinated, and even as a small child he insisted on wearing a rose bloom in his buttonhole when he attended church with his family.

As a young man Pemberton studied theology, became a curate and was eventually the inaugural priest of the Church of Ascension at nearby Romford. In his spare time, he followed a variety of interests in addition to cricket. He was a breeder of horses, but it was his love of roses that led to his lifelong hobby of exhibiting and eventually breeding the loveliest of all garden plants.

At the age of 22, Reverend Pemberton began exhibiting roses from the long established garden at the family home, which by that time was occupied only by himself and his sister Florence, five years his junior. Neither Joseph nor Florence ever married and they lived together there until Joseph’s death in 1926. Florence soon became as immersed in exhibiting roses as was her brother and they were inseparable joint exhibitors at rose shows for many years.

It was almost inevitable that Pemberton would eventually dabble in breeding roses. When he emerged onto the scene as a breeder, however, it wasn’t with the aim of producing exhibition blooms. His aim was to establish robust varieties which would bloom for long periods while retaining the charm of the old roses in the Pemberton garden. As the foundation stock for his breeding line, Joseph chose a shrubby rose ‘Trier’ from a German breeder, Herr Peter Lambert. By introducing carefully selected elements from roses in his late grandmother’s collection, Rev Pemberton gave birth to a unique grouping of roses which were later classified by leading rosarians of the day as Hybrid Musk roses. Pemberton, who became a nurseryman on his retirement from the clergy at age 60, himself adopted the term ‘Hybrid Musk’ soon after.

Following Joseph’s death in 1926, the nursery continued under the management of Florence Pemberton and in total, the Pemberton nursery introduced close to fifty new varieties, two of their early successes being Hybrid Musk roses ‘Pax’ and ‘Moonlight’.  Another popular creation was ‘Pemberton’s White Rambler’. ‘Robin Hood’, introduced the year following Joseph’s death, became a parent of numerous Kordes roses, including ‘Iceberg’.

And so to the Australian cricketer, Max Walker. Following Walker’s retirement from an illustrious test cricketing career, he became a popular author and a pioneer of the after-dinner speaking circuit. He was (and still is) a larger-than-life character and a wonderful storyteller. When asked how one person could possibly have witnessed so many outrageously hilarious incidents in a relatively short period as an international sportsman, Walker replied “I never let the truth stand in the way of a good story”.

An English rose nursery’s website advertises three of Rev Pemberton’s roses as “The Vicar’s Daughters Collection”, claiming ‘Penelope’, ‘Cornelia’ and ‘Felicia’ were named after Joseph Pemberton’s daughters. Did the nursery’s marketing guru follow Max Walker’s example, or could it be that the bachelor vicar had a dark secret? 

A Thorn Amongst the Roses

How I admire bloggers who have something interesting to share most days. The frequent long gaps between posts on this blog are testament to my lack of such inspiration. Recently I undertook to contribute a regular column to the monthly newsletter of my local rose society. I find it more difficult than I had imagined, much as I enjoy it. Once again, lack of inspiration is my Achilles heal. Posting my monthly efforts here is not, I'm sure, going to greatly increase the readership of my column, but I thought I would share them anyway. Here's the first one, from about three months ago, with others to follow from time to time.

Given my family history, editor Dave is taking a huge risk in allowing me to contribute a column to this newsletter. Throughout my father’s long life, he told us many times that he first played what is now called premiership grade rugby in the season after his club won a premiership title. The rugby club in question won its next title 76 years later, ending the drought which my self-deprecating dad claimed to have started.  Let us all hope my debut as a contributor doesn’t mark the beginning of a similar hiatus for ORS in the “Best Small Newsletter” stakes!

The purpose of this column is to entertain. If it informs, that will be a bonus. If it does neither, the writer will be unemployed and hungry. It is assumed that while readers are rose enthusiasts, they have an interest in gardening generally. Let’s get started then.

The naming of roses is a fascinating topic. Many names, most even, have an interesting story behind them. It really is regrettable that there is not a system in place which records those stories, perhaps in the registration process. For example, naming a rose in memory of a loved and respected person may be effective in perpetuating the person’s name, but unless the individual is particularly well known for some other reason, e.g. ‘Sir Edmund Hillary’, ‘Hayley Westenra’ or ‘Kate Sheppard’, nobody knows anything about the person behind the name and the opportunity to celebrate their life and achievements is lost.

Many roses are named with sales in mind (‘Everlasting Love’, ‘Many Happy Returns’, ‘Loving Memory’, etc) and while the practice is understandable, it does nothing for the intrigue of rose names. Much more exciting are the likes of ‘Squatter’s Dream’, ‘Earth Song’ and ‘Rambling Rector’, but even then the story is usually left to the imagination.

Not so with David Austin’s English Rose Collection. The names of his roses are as fascinating as England itself and in almost every case, if the name is not easily recognizable in British culture, history or literature, it will be explained in Austin’s books or on his company website. For example, ‘Lady of Megginch’ was named for the late Baroness Strange, whose family home is Megginch Castle in Perth, Scotland; ‘Lady Emma Hamilton’ was the mistress of Lord Nelson and ‘Brother Cadfael’ is the main character in a series of mediaeval whodunnits written by English author Edith Pargeter under the nom-de-plume ‘Ellis Peters’.

Even potential names Austin has not used inspire curiosity. While he has named many roses for Shakespearean characters and those of other notable English writers, I can find no rose with a name from any of Charles Dickens’ works. As other breeders have used some such names in the past, one must assume it is not because of copyright issues, so does Austin have an aversion to Dickens? If that is so, he has no such aversion to Thomas Hardy, the titles of at least three of whose Wessex novels are honoured with the names of roses: “The Mayor of Casterbridge’, ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ and……

'Jude the Obscure'

People and their Gardens

My work often involves visiting people at their homes. Mostly, when I walk through the front gate and up the path, I have very little factual information about the person or people behind the door. But I can usually make a pretty intelligent guess about their personalities. How? In order to reach the front door, one has to negotiate the garden, which always says a great deal about the occupants of the property.

Immaculately groomed gardens are usually the domains of meticulous and extremely punctual folk. If you're visiting by appointment, don't be late.

Gardens featuring ornamental grasses, astelias, manicured pebble mulches and modern sculptures are almost always owned by people who don't have much creativity but are desperate for others to think they do, so they've hired a professional to design and create a garden like the Joneses'. Don't fart in their garden, because they wouldn't even do so themselves.

 

Colourful gardens with heaps of flowering plants signify happy, friendly individuals who are usually at peace with themselves and with the world. Nice people to spend time with.

Unkempt, overgrown gardens can sometimes indicate unfortunate occupants who are not well enough or strong enough to keep their surroundings tidy and don't have the means of paying someone else to do so. In other cases they lack respect for themselves and their neighbours and they are downright lazy.

Quirky and original gardens are owned by creative people, usually with a sense of humour and the balls to be themselves.

How quickly are we changing our ways?

While gardening this morning, I dug up an old plastic supermarket bag. How do I know it's old? Certainly not by the condition of the plastic. A wipe with a damp cloth and it was as good as the day it was carried from the checkout to the car. I know it's considerably more than ten years old because it was buried in an area of my property that hasn't been disturbed in the ten years since I acquired it. In fact, when I moved to this place, it was apparent from the overgrowth that the area hadn't been disturbed for many a year before that.

Now, gardening always sets me to thinking. That's part of why I find it therapeutic. But this subterranean find gave me something to think about. Have a look at the proud claim made by the chest-beating grocery chain of the day:

On the positive side, some (former?) perpetrators of eco-vandalism have progressed from a world where credit could be claimed for saving resources and providing a use for previously used materials, to a world where some of them provide disincentives to the use of environmentally harmful materials - e.g. charging for plastic bags. But on the negative side, it's slow progress indeed. The other point worth considering is the seemingly indestructible nature of the material. If it's still in perfect condition after 10-20 years in the soil, how many generations is it going to be before it disappears - if ever?

Big reward for little effort

For years, I avoided doing anything about a difficult little dry strip on the east side of the house. It was under the eaves, a long way from a hose-tap and the very ordinary soil was littered with builders' rubble. Then in early Spring a few wildflower seeds came my way, so I lightly forked the area over and threw them in. Now I'm thinking it was well worth the twenty minutes' effort I put in.

Wildlife in the bathroom

Look what greeted us in the bathroom this morning!

I think it's one of New Zealand's 70 something species of native weta which apparently made its entry overnight through a partly open window. I really would like to think its appearance is due to my "no spray" regime in the garden over the past three years and that this is evidence of my garden becoming home to an ever increasing amount of insect life. Alas, I fear that is not the truth of the matter (although I'm sure the insect population is increasing). I think this handsome visitor probably hitched a ride on a trailerload of firewood that my neighbour brought in from a forest in the country and parked in his driveway overnight. It has been released gently and lovingly amongst some rhododendrons. Perhaps it is bearing eggs and will populate the garden with its progeny!

For the record, the body is about one and a half centimetres (three quarters of an inch) long - a mere miniature compared with some of the giant species in the New Zealand bush.

...and still the bee doth toil

Late evening in my garden.

The wind doth blow, the rain doth fall, and still the bee doth toil.

Reality Check for a Gardener

I turned a cubic metre of compost today. In other words I forked it from one container to another, the purpose being to aerate it, as brown matter (carbon), green matter (nitrogen), water and air are said to be the essential ingredients in compost making. Don't ask me why - it just says so in the books, and the answer would bore me witless, anyway. The compost was but a week old. I had carefully laid down alternate tiers of dry, brown vegetation and green, sappy lawn clippings mixed with kitchen waste and weeds just seven days previously. I've done this a hundred times before and it has always seemed quite an exhausting chore. But this time, I got to thinking about the miraculous transformation that had take place in the short space of one week. No longer recognisable were the potato peelings, orange skins, paper towels or any of the other items in the kitchen waste. No longer identifiable were the lawn clippings, leaves or weeds. Where there had been no worms seven days ago there were now hundreds - possibly thousands - and yet in those few short days the heap had risen to, and cooled from a temperature at which no earthworm could survive. I've no idea how many millions of microorganisms worked every minute of every day to achieve this miracle of nature, or how many more will beaver away their entire lives in my heap before I have a bin of rich, friable compost to spread on my garden. But as I wandered off indoors to take a rest with a cool drink while watching cricket match on the 42" plasma, I somehow felt like a lazy slob.