Get Thee Behind Me, Rose!
I was webless for several hours again today: semi-webless: email, blog and web site went into candlelight and quill pen mode,* although my internet connection was still scintillating. So instead of briskly answering a few emails as a way of sharpening up my brain for using the English language and plunging thence into work, I spent way too much of a (shamefully enjoyable) afternoon choosing roses. Some of you** may remember that I mentioned a few days ago that Peter Beales Roses is having a twenty per cent off sale.*** I had ordered from them for this past autumn† and . . . it’s not my fault! They require your email address! I can’t help it that they send me bulletins of special offers!†† And the sale is over the end of January! You wouldn’t want me to miss it!
I was chiefly just going to, you know, cruise . . . which is the worst really. You need to have a list, and then you need to Get In. And. Get Out. Which I signally failed to do. My single mandate was that Peter wants a rose for a north wall.
I seem to have bought ten. . . .
Aimee Vibert
Duchesse d’Auerstadt
Long John Silver
Lady Waterlow
Phyllis Bide
Prosperity
Bishop Darlington
Cameo
Margo Koster
Marie Jeanne
. . . Which I will annotate for you some other dark freezing evening. This is already long enough††† and hellhounds, in these ME-hagged days, have grown accustomed to the idea that we spend some of our evening on the sofa and I’m being importuned. . . .
* * *
* I want a head to roll. And I am gonna roll that sucker.
** With perhaps similar preoccupations
*** Of course several of the roses that ended up on my short^ list weren’t eligible for the sale. Of course.
^ relatively
† That’s the rose hedge, now climbing the side of the kitchen sink at the cottage, saying hello to the camellia on the stool by the door (which, when it isn’t holding camellias, is extra cough-cough counter space), and peering over the edge of the sink at the dish drainer on the far side, no doubt estimating distance. –I can hook that wine glass! I can! The rose hedge, for full disclosure, consists of
1. Tipsy Imperial Concubine, which is where the trouble started this cold winter since she’s known to be tender and cranky^
2. Danae, which is, at least in England, a seriously underappreciated Hybrid Musk, and I’ve only not replaced her since we moved because she’s a trifle, uh, enthusiastic. But I find increasingly as the years pass that I buy the roses I miss the most and figure out what to do with them later. Well. I have always bought roses I want the most and figured out what to do with them later, I just used to have two and a quarter acres to do it in.
3. Comtesse du Cayla, which is, or anyway was for me, one of the tougher Chinas and comes under the new-small-house category of, oh I can put her in a pot which in rose-greed-think means ‘won’t take up any room’^^. Uh huh. In practise I’m going to have to ask Atlas to design pot-rose shelving.
4. Mutabilis . . . for the third time.^^^ Although number two is not definitively dead yet, I didn’t feel like hanging around. I know Mutabilis of old: she has a perverse sense of humour. If I didn’t buy another one for this year, number two will absolutely die. Since I have bought another one, number two may very well pull herself together. Really I brought this on myself, having thought to plant her over the grave of my cranky and perverse first whippet, Rowan, although I did it feeling that they’d get along. They’re obviously getting along famously. But it’s nice really to know that Rowan is still yanking me around from the next world.
Even if it weren’t for Tipsy Imperial I’d've had to bring the hedge indoors, because a new bare-root Mutabilis would take a degree of frost as an excuse to croak. Never mind that The One That Grew at the old house (as opposed, you understand, to the One That Did Not Grow), shot up spectacularly above the wall that was supposed to be protecting her and stood in the teeth of any number of gales going ‘nyah nyah’ and blossoming like crazy every summer. Chinas, like teas, are often tender. If they feel like it. Or not. If they feel like it. Louis XIV, who is sharing the geranium’s cardboard igloo^^^, is also a China, and this winter I’d probably be nervously wrapping her up even if she weren’t sharing planter space with a geranium. I shouldn’t have Chinas–or geraniums–in that corner in front of the house: Note to self. Which I will, of course, ignore, because there’s nowhere to move that particular planter to. At least not till Atlas builds me some shelves.
^ As a general rule, anything that is exclusive to Peter Beales is going to be tender and cranky. They’re often a lot of fun in a challenging sort of way, but they are not anything you stick in the ground and forget about.
^^ Margo Koster, Marie-Jeanne and Cameo of today’s order all come under this category also. Sigh.
^^^ I’ve got Mermaid coming for the third time from David Austin. And Souvenir du Docteur Jamain for the second. Or fourth, depending on how you’re counting: it took me two tries to get her+ going back at the old house.
+ I’ve told you all roses are she, haven’t I? And of course who’s to say Dr Jamain wasn’t a Nicole or a Musetta? Although since she’s from 1865, it’s not very likely.#
# I’m totally failing to convince Google to produce the name and date of the first French woman doctor.
^^^ Ah yes, the cardboard igloo. After almost an inch and a half of rain in forty-eight hours+, last night we had another hard frost, for which the new igloo system was initiated, which involved a second, inner cardboard layer. Tonight we’re going to have another pretty serious frost . . . and then it’s going to warm up and start raining by morning. Great. Thanks. Given my usual hours I suppose I could just stay up . . . but even if it happened as predicted, which it wouldn’t, I don’t actually fancy going out on the street, even my tiny side street, at 3 or 4 am in my dressing gown. Not that the neighbours would bat an eye: in the first place, any eye open at that hour deserves what it gets, and in the second place, they’re already well-broken-in to my being out there somewhat earlier in the day and saying What the hell is the matter with you you stupid piece of lion-maned tamarin dung, or words to that effect, when the cardboard box hangs up on the stake as I’m putting it on, which it always does.
So: the answer: large black plastic garbage bags over the igloo! –The neighbours really are going to report me to the Landscape Fashion Police. I’d better check when the Posh National-Collections Garden at the Top of the Hill is open–because they start being open soon, for snowdrops++–and get my igloos down betimes on those days.
+ I bought my new rain gauge just in time for some really great complaining. Yesssssssss.
++ I saw my first snowdrops today! Yaaaaay! Crazy little beggars, out in this weather. Mine aren’t, yet, but they’re coming: the white is cracking through the green.
†† They also sent me notice of their sale on standard roses. Uh . . . a pair of nice little weeping standards for Third House’s front door. . . .^
^ Note that when I spoke to my builder week before last, work was going to start last week. It didn’t. Are any of you amazed? I didn’t think so. Neither was I.
††† !!!!!!!!!!!
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