A Bouquet of Roses

There is nothing like the scent and beauty of a rose. In three short years I have added twenty roses to the strolling garden. Hoping to add images and descriptions of each variety I starting taking photographs like crazy... and learned that the colors of the photos don't come anywhere close to the vividness of the original item. So keep that in mind when looking at the images as they are added.

Left:  Climbing America is an amazingly vigorous plant with large salmon colored blooms with a "spicy" fragrance (so claims the tag that came with the plant). It has proven to be very hardy here in zone 7. It has doubled it's size in two years. One plant literally has over 100 buds on it and has grown to over six feet tall. If you plant this keep in mind that it grows out horizontally in addition to vertically. I have one massive branch over almost 6.5 feet tall growing away from the arbor and there has to be at least 40 blossoms on it alone.

Close ups of blossoms captured when a few rays of sun escaped through the clouds.

My friend, Tony, had planted two of these at the base of a three legged metal scrolled arbor. A white rose, whose name I forgot, was planted at the base of the third leg. They weren't large plants but hardy. However by next spring I had three Climbing America plants... all three were salmon pink! Weird but still beautiful. This year I noticed that two of the plants have a deep red roses entertwining in the branches. My co-worker, an longtime gardener, told me that the deep red was probably due to one rose being grafted onto another variety. The deep red is probably the original, hardy plant with the America being grafted onto the stem. Either way, I ended up two rose bushes that are "two-for's" having salmon and deep red rose buds. Both varieties seem health and compliment one another wonderfully.