Here in Global Warming Central, boosterishly known as the Valley of the (We-Do-Mean) Sun, spring comes early. Very early. As in, ohhh, along about now. My poor little house has been massively neglected over the past several months, and that includes its several small gardens, tiny oases in the quarter-acre expanse of gravel and crushed granite that Phoenicians imagine is “desert landscaping.”
So, I’ve spent most of the day working.
A number of pre-spring chores need to be done at this time of year. Foremost among them is pruning roses, if you’re foolish enough to have them. As I mentioned a little earlier, I had Gerardo the Wonder Yard Dude make his underlings take out the moribund roses in front, which I simply haven’t been able to keep alive.
So I installed a bunch of fine bargain plants from Home Depot in front, took a couple of them back, planted about half the bulbs I’d bought there. We shall see how that turns out…however, it can’t be much worse than the perennially sick roses.
On the west side, the lovely climbing roses that in the past have made the Leafy Bower such a sweet place to sit for breakfast and lunch and…well, for blogging on one’s laptop…have been struggling. Last summer I thought they were dying and figured that come January, when the local nurseries trot out their treasury of rose plants, I’d have to pull them up and go buy some new ones.
But…
In the first place, I really didn’t want to kill those wonderful plants. I’m a sucker for plants and have a hard time bringing myself to commit planticide.
And in the second place, last summer it finally dawned on me that what ailed the sickly orange tree was pretty obvious: not enough water.
We’re in…what? the tenth year of drought here. This past twelve months have been ridiculous. We’ve barely seen a drop of rain. Once again, the summer monsoons never materialized, and the winter rainy season brought maybe one shower. And you know, on its own, a drip irrigation system just isn’t enough to keep landscape planting alive through a 115-degree summer.
No.
Not even desert landscaping.
Which climbing roses decidedly are not.
When Richard the Landscaping Dude put in the “desert landscaping,” (I use the scare quotes advisedly), he provided two tiny little rock-lined wells for the climbing roses. These sufficed for a while, and they could be ignored in years when we had normal rainfall. But of late, the roses have needed a lot more water than I’ve been giving them. We haven’t had a “normal” rainfall in three years. Or more…I’ve lost count.
Setting the sprinkler on them and letting it run until the water bill was like to bankrupt me helped. They put out some new growth and showed signs of trying to fight their way back to health.
So I figured come wintertime, when the weather is cool enough for a human to slam around outside, I would treat the roses to the same strategy that worked so well on the orange tree (which has recovered and this winter has produced astonishingly wonderful fruit). To wit: hoe, shovel, and scrape back the crushed granite ground cover, pull up the fabric weed barrier, rebuild the irrigation well, add new compost and garden soil, and WATER the damn things. Deep and often.
It’s not a job I’ve been looking forward to.
But today was the day. It occupied all the morning and about half the afternoon. And just now I hurt allll over my bodddeeee.
The job was not as difficult as expected. But it still was a bitch of a job.
Started the morning by trimming the considerable deadwood out of the roses. There wasn’t as much as I figured (hence “not as difficult as…”), because many of the dead branches and twigs came from a single dead stem, and there were only a few of these. So what looked like a hideous amount of work was really just a matter of trimming back and trimming back until one came to a central dead branch, and then cutting that back to its base.
Quite a bit of the plants remained, thank goodness:
(Click on the images for a better view.)
It left enough of both roses that, assuming they spring back, by next summer they should provide plenty of shade and, with any luck, lots of coral-red blooms.
The big job entailed scraping back the “desert landscaping” — about four inches of crushed granite — to expand each rose’s watering well, re-edging each one with large (heavy!) rocks, laying down rose fertilizer, filling the enlarged wells with compost and planting soil, digging the new dirt in with the rose fertilizer and the caliche, and finally finding places for the many bulbs left over from last week’s front-yard planting frenzy.
This, naturally, required yet another trip to Home Depot.
Returned $24 worth of plants and junk; spent $30 on systemic rose fertilizer/disease treatment/insecticide and plastic-wrapped dirt.
Yes, I do have some compost in the bin, but recently I added a thick layer of new stuff, which isn’t ready to go, and my back just simply hurts too goddamn much to dump all that stuff and filter out the finished compost. So I bought one bag of allegedly organic compost and two bags of garden soil.
Yeah.
I know.
Screw it. If I waited to do it right, it would never get done, because the likelihood that I’ll work up the energy to finish this job anytime in the near or distant future is nil.
Dry? Lemme tell you dry. The ground beneath those roses was so dry that when I’d set a shovel to it, the shovel would go cho-i-i-i-i-i-ng!!!! and bounce back in my face. That the roses are still alive at all is amazing.
Dragged a piece of flagstone around from the backyard to add to the single stone Satan had placed there when he built the ersatz wood deck. This made the larger irrigation wells look like someone had planned them (heh!) and provided little spaces for some kewl bulbs. An Asiatic lily dubbed “Commander in Chief” occupies one corner. The other: dahlias. A lot of dahlias now reside in these flowerbeds. And lilies of the valley.
It’s not huge, but it’s big enough to give some space to dig in rose fertilizer a few times a year, and it’s low enough to hold a fair amount of water. Those blossoms pictured at the top of this post are “Commander in Chief” lilies. We’ll see if they grow here in lovely uptown Phoenix.
And, soon enough, we’ll see if this scheme rescues the belovèd climbing roses.
Image at the top: “Commander in Chief” lily, shamelessly ripped off the Internet.
