We have all made mistakes with our rose gardens, and I am no exception.  I try not to make the same mistake twice.  Unfortunately, I like many of you, think we know it all, or how hard can it be?  Just dig a hole and plant it, it will be a beautiful plant in no time.  I wish it was that easy.

I wrote about my mistakes with my first few rose gardens before.  Planting too many roses in a short space, not considering disease problems or growth habits, believing all roses will grow great and healthy in our climate, not considering drainage or soil compositions, adding too much pesticide to spray, using the wrong mulch, etc. 

There are other stories about my problems with gardening in general and with roses.  The first I recall was the day I was fixing the rose garden because it sloped to a central drain that didn’t work and I had a 24/7 swimming pond.  It was nice, but the roses hated it and I lost most of them when they drowned.  So I decided to terrace the garden into beds as I have right now.  The good roses I heeled into the veggie garden.  That was in January of 1994.  You get the hint what happened.  After the Northridge earthquake hit, finishing the garden was the last thing on my mind.  As a matter of fact, I was planning to finish up the new beds and start transplanting the roses that every day, as Mondays are my day off.  The roses were not happy when I dug them up two months later when they had a lot of new growth.  Most of the growth dropped off when I transplanted the roses, and I lost a few.  By heeling in, there is little soil to dig up with the roots.

I had an area near the veggie bed where I decided to plant a white garden with all kinds of white roses and flowers, plus gray foliage such as Lamb’s Ears.  What I didn’t take into account was my neighbor.  That part of the garden is a low spot and my neighbor waters everyday, turning the area into a bog reminiscent of the bayous of Louisiana.  Needless to say all the plants died as they didn’t like sitting in water.  I have since changed the white garden into a swampland, and planted plants that love to sit in water.  The dead birch is now a Redtwig Dogwood, the border plants Lobelia, I just planted Siberian Irises, I have several varieties of rush and reeds, and I have two startings of the swamp rose, Rosa palustris.  I have a few more plants to get, but it should stand the test of time, and my neighbor.  The best part is all the new line material I have now that other arrangers don’t.  I will call this my Marilyn Wellan Garden, in honor of her state. 

My veggie garden is another example of something that went haywire.  I first started growing the veggies in the ground.  Being, well attempting to be, a good environmentally sound gardener, I saved all of my organic materials from the yard to make compost.  This included kitchen waste, grass mowings, bush trimmings, etc.  Well, the compost never did cook right and all I accomplished was spreading grass, especially Bermuda, into the veggie bed that I have yet to this day gotten rid of.  I use heavy duty herbicides each year to try and get rid of it, but it keeps coming back and grows like a weed during the summer.  I tried to fix it by building raised beds; all of 6 inches, and used a weed blocker mat.  But it didn’t work, and the soil was too shallow for the veggies to do well.  I have since continued to hit the grass hard with herbicide and hope I will conquer it, and the veggie beds have been raised to 12 inches, so the plants will have a good root system. 

Planting the wrong type of plant is another horror story.  The first was a cute little ground cover called potenilla.  This low growing plant bloomed a lot with small yellow flowers.  What I didn’t know is this pest is related to roses, gets mildew badly, and you can’t kill it off!  It also keeps coming back, no matter how much herbicide I use.  When I first moved into my current house back in 1986, I imagined the walls covered with different blooming vines.  I planted Carolina Jessamine, and two types of Honeysuckle.  BIG MISTAKE!  I learned the lesson of evasive plants.  I am still trying to get rid of the honeysuckle today.

In the same line, I have bought and lost a lot of plants because I never took into consideration our climate, especially the cold temperatures.  I planted, and lost during hard freezes, many plants that grow wild just five miles away in the San Fernando Valley.  Hibiscus, bougainvillea, citrus, etc., all died in the first heavy frost, even though they were planted near the house or a wall.  The bougainvillea died back to the ground each year and always came back, until the year the temperatures dropped to 19 degrees. 

Another climate feature I didn’t take into account for was moisture.  Many of the plants that thrive back east do not like the dry air and arid conditions in our area.  I have lost numerous plants, such as hostas, astilbes, orchids, etc.  Shade is always tough and in the early years I tried to grow roses in the shade.  Although many roses will tolerate less sun, they tend to be more disease prone and poor bloomers.  I lost a lot of roses this way, including My Sunshine, Iceberg, Belle Amour, etc., that are supposedly great shade plants.  I guess they needed direct sun and not so much filtered sun.  This was also before I got heavily involved with roses. 

In the same vein, I tried to put in a perennial bed to add color interest to the yard year round.  As above, I tried different plants, ferns, grasses, etc.  I also lost a lot of the plants.  Some I am sure were due to the clay soil, poor drainage, shade, and heat.  Hard to find plants, other than weeds, which thrive in that type of climate.  Three years later, I am still looking for the last few plants to have a full border.

I tried to have a lot of roses and other plants in pots, so I can move them around when I was cleaning up or to brighten an area.  I made sure all of the pots had the water holding saucers.  Another big mistake as they tend to hold water at the bottom of the plant, which causes the soil to rot and eventually kill the plant.  I make sure all of the pots do not have a water saucer on them now.   

After I first moved into my house, I planted a large Modesto Ash.  It grew like a weed to about 30 feet tall in a few years.  I though the tree would look great with a planter box around the base of the tree and plant color and mini roses in there.  The flowers did well, the roses and the tree didn’t.  They all died within six months. 

I love Corkscrew Willows and ordered two different types.  Supposedly the growth habits were similar.  One was a tad smaller growing than the other, so I thought I had planted the smaller one in the back yard and the larger one in the front.  The truck of each was about 2 inches, and within three years, they had grown huge!  Of course the small one ended up front and the large one in the back yard.  Too late to do much about it now.  The large one is about 50-60 feet tall in eight years, while the one up front is about 30 feet. 

One mistake I wish I didn’t make concerned the drain in the back yard.  I figured the contractors who built the house had the drain all worked out, so I covered up most of it under concrete.  The drain never worked well and would often plug, mostly from the roots from my neighbors tree.  For most rains, it can handle it, but we tend to get one or two days with very heavy rain, 6 to 10 inches a day.  The drain can’t handle it and the water backs up on the patio.  The problem is it has no where to go so last year it almost came into the house.  We rushed out and bought a ¾ sump pump and pumped all we could.  The pump is rated at 1600 gallons an hour.  During the last rain, I was up every 2 hours to turn it on and it pumped for 20 minutes.  So you can imagine how much rain we get.  Luckily we are planning to redo the patio area and tear up the concrete, so I will have the gardeners put in a new drain system with 4 inch lines, not the 3 inch one we have now.  It will be a mess, but worth it when the heavy rains come next year. 

When I first moved to my current house, I thought it would be cool to have a seclusion area where I can go and sit with a glass of wine.  I made a trellis “cage” in the corner of the property and planted a lot of shade loving plants in there.  As I found out, the shade loving plants did not like the dry heat of summer and most died out.  To keep other plants alive, I had to water a lot.  Well, the seat and area was too wet, and the wood for the supports rotted away quickly.  I eventually tore it down, well, the climbing roses I had on it did it for me, and eventually it collapsed under the weight of the climbers.  All that remains is 2 sides, which I have supported to grow some other climbers on. 

Cleaning out plants was another issue that I didn’t take into account.  Those cute vines soon took over the yard.  I was amiss about pruning them back until I got tired of them.  By then, they had wrapped themselves so tightly around other plants, they deformed the plants.  You can still see the effects on the twisted junipers.  The vines choked out the lower branches so they never developed properly.  I should take out the twisted junipers, but they are a screen for my neighbor in back whose property is higher than mine.

Talk about too many roses.  When I had to have them all, and propagated every rose I could find, I had nursery pots all over the yard.  Part of my lawn was pots.  Well in time, I didn’t take care of them as well as I should, couldn’t get into areas to prune or feed them properly, and lost a lot of roses over the years.  That is when I decided to cut down the number of roses.  I figured 300 would be a good number (down from 850, plus hundred of cuttings and seedlings from hybridizing), but I have only made it down to 350.  I am back up some, but still working to that 300 number, a number I feel is easy to maintain.  Bob Martin called it my jungle, and that is what it looked like.  Now I have somewhat of a back yard left. 

I am sure most of you can relate to the trials and tribulations I have gone through, and hopefully we will never make the same gardening mistake twice.