Hot Cocoa in all its glory last summer

In the garden of the first house I inhabited here in Vancouver I carefully nurtured 23 roses, with all that entailed: pruning, spraying, deadheading, etc.
When I moved here more than 30 years ago, the garden was barely established and there were a couple of roses which did not do at all well. Since this house has an east/west location and not really enough hours of sun, especially as the trees grew, it became more of a shade garden. Eventually I reefed out the roses and decided no more.

But last year, on a visit to the nursery, I was tempted again to consider them. After a long conversation with someone I met there who was a member of the Vancouver Rose Society and who assured me they would do very well in containers, I bought two roses: Hot Cocoa (above), a gorgeous floribunda, an All America Rose Selection winner in 2003 and Indian Summer (below), a large flowered hybrid tea rose with a lovely scent.

As you recall we had quite the harsh winter last year and sadly Hot Cocoa succumbed while Indian Summer seems to be made of sterner stuff and is blooming again faithfully as you can see here.


Indian Summer, in all its glory, except for the holes in the leaves!

Now the newer roses are supposedly more resistant to pests and disease. I now take a rather hands off attitude to my roses, since I don’t like to use poisons or rather I am too lazy to go to all that fuss. But I would not say that the roses I have at the moment are exactly pest/disease free. In fact quite the opposite.


How ugly are these leaves, for whatever reason

Since I loved the unique colours and the floriferous performance of Hot Cocoa last year I decided to buy another (below). What the heck? As you can clearly see this is marked (well you can if you click on it to enlarge) Hot Cocoa but the rose is white!!!!! Next time I’ll wait until there is a flower in bloom before I buy.

Early in the season a friend said to me, “I am going to buy one of the new roses. I don’t care what colour it is but it has to be one of those new pest/disease free ones.” Great idea. So I bought one too. Carefree Celebration, introduced in 2007 and guaranteed to be very disease resistant. What I did not notice is that it grows rather large in size, not quite suitable for a container. That will teach me to read the whole notice and not get sucked in by the carefree assurance.


Carefree Celebration, flowering quite nicely but a bit chewed too

Oh well, there is always next year.

* A quote from Gertrude Stein (probably her most famous), now part of the lexicon meaning, “things are just what they are”.