This is "Graham Thomas" one of my favourite from David Austin Roses

Rosa Rugosa "alba". It's stunning beauty lies in its simplicity. It only blooms once, but is well worth a special place in the garden.

A foundling I rescued. No idea what its name is. Can anybody help me identify it? So far it has not appeared in any of my rose books.

This cute little rose is a miniature named "Angel Wings". I started it from seed in my greenhouse in 2006. We're still getting to know one another and so far, we are getting on famously.

With Canada Day just around the corner, what could be more appropriate than the rose "Oh Canada" blooming in time to celebrate the holiday?

FAILURES

As much as we don’t like to admit it, we all experience some failures in our gardening endeavors. Some are fairly major and expensive, some are small enough that they barely put a dent into our gardening psyches. Either way, lack of success seldom turns anyone off gardening permanently. It just gets chalked up as a learning experience.

By writing this, I am forcing myself to admit that our rose garden is a failure. All those beautiful, precious Austin roses I love, do not love me back. Well, not since I moved them two years ago. They were growing quite happily in the perennial garden, but I had to move them! I had to have a dedicated rose garden. So, I very carefully dug them up and transplanted them into a sunny, little garden all by themselves. I fertilized them with transplant fertilizer, I mulched the bed, I kept them watered. As the season progressed, I top dressed the bed with composted manure, and fertilized them with my favourite rose fertilizer. But still the roses languished in their new home.

The next season I nursed the roses along, feeding, watering and mulching them. How did they respond to all the extra care and attention I gave them? Not well. They grudgingly produced a couple of small blooms each, their leaves were small and the shrubs refused to grow any wider or taller. Now, I expected the roses to have a bit of a temper tantrum when they were first moved, but they should have quit sulking by the second year. What was going on with those blinking roses!? Something just was not making sense. Well, duh! Test the soil! Which I did, and found the PH level of the soil went right off the scale. In other words, the soil is way too acidic for roses. By now it was mid September, so there was little I could do to help them at that point in the gardening year.

Summer is now just around the corner and I’ll have to make a decision about the rose garden soon. Do I move it again and start fresh, or do I attempt to recondition the soil with garden lime? (Can I afford that much lime?) I am leaning towards moving the garden in its entirety. If I do, I’ll test the soil before I begin digging. Strange this about this property: We have pockets of soil that are extremely acidic. They are all over the place! We have theorized that these acidic pockets have been caused by motor oil and the like. That is based on information gleaned from long time residents of the village who claim one of the previous owners used to fix cars in the back yard. If that is true, all these high acid areas that appear in unexpected spots, make sense.

So, our rose garden is not a success because I failed to test the soil before I began digging. But, I am not shouldering all of the responsibility. Some of that lies with an owner, who many years ago, irresponsibly dumped motor oil onto the ground instead of disposing of it correctly. It is with good reason motor oil is considered hazardous waste – it does not go away. The morals of this story are: A) Do not dump motor oil in your garden. B) If your gardens are not performing well despite your best efforts, test the PH of the soil. Maybe you'll discover it is not the lack of good gardening skills causing problems, but the lack of good soil.