Tag: White roses

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The Lizard’s Rose (And Yellow Star Jasmine)

Creamy-white rose with double flowers

For several years my sweetheart has been growing a white rose that has been very reliable in his Mississippi garden. I have my fingers crossed as I write. He’s due back home this week and will find out how many plants have survived the summer’s drought, which is reported to have killed even well-established plants.

If the rose has survived unscathed it will have been thoroughly tested. A couple of cold spells last winter put paid to a fine rosemary bush that had been growing beside it and bit off star jasmine below ground level. Continue reading “The Lizard’s Rose (And Yellow Star Jasmine)”

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Gallery of White Roses

White roses

“There is something quite special about white roses… they are all purity and light.” – David Austin

I’m sharing pictures of white shrub roses and rambling roses in eager anticipation of the peak flowering season for roses which is a couple of weeks or so away in my part of the world. As my sweetheart would say, bring it on! Meanwhile, I’ll let the roses do their own talking.

Rosa 'Desdemona'
Rosa ‘Desdemona’

Continue reading “Gallery of White Roses”

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Prolific Shrub And Rambler Roses

A cluster of pink roses

The best roses are prolific. Don’t get me wrong – I do enjoy spotting a spindly climbing rose around the entrance to an old cottage or leaning in a corner of a graveyard as much as the next person. And I try not to judge. Tough enough, these roses give the impression that they are barely clinging on to life. Often they are red ones, throwing out a long, languidly arching stem to one side or the other that they wave around romantically in the wind, careless of their own mortality. Those are the ones that can get away with the merest peppering of tatty blooms and still provoke a genuine ‘ooh!’ or an ‘aah…”, until I pull out a camera, of course, when the ‘ooh!’ usually turns to an ‘oh!’ in an instant.

No, give me the prolific ones, where bloom competes with bloom for its moment in the full sun.

Ballerina roses

I don’t know the name of the pink rose at the top, but the second one is Rosa ‘Ballerina’, a shrub rose (technically a hybrid musk) that liberally smothers itself in flowers. The young flowers are bee targets, like fried eggs, dressed up in pink edges for a garden party. The elderly flowers lost their pink days ago, paling to white, and making a lovely contrast.  Continue reading “Prolific Shrub And Rambler Roses”