Roses

[-LiveWire-]

One of my favourite flowers :)

http://www.rosarian.com/

[Dasyurus Maculatus]

Thanks LiveWire for promoting Roses. Roses are under-valued by too many gardeners.

A lot of old fashioned varieties grown for their perfume have been lost, with Hybrid varieties swamping the market.

For Home Defense, a classic climbing Rose like danse-de-Feu (Fire Dance) will make a more aesthetically pleasing fence round your garden than barbed wire - guaranteed Coon-Proof fencing can be grown with a mix of Rose bush and spiked low maintenance evergreen hedging (Berberis) is recommended.

Fire Dance thrives in temperate and dry climates, and in poor soils and is low maintenance>http://www.classicroses.co.uk/roses/d/danse_de_feu.html

On my allottment of 5 poles of land (The quaint Anglo-Saxon unit of the pole for land measure is still used in Britain) I have salvaged over six dozen varieties of old English Rose (Wall climbers, bush and dwarf varieties) from the collection at Steart Hill House in Buckinghamshire - to create a genetic reserve of floral stock . Steart Hill Houses famous rose garden due to be bulldozed to creat a Golf Curse and 'green desert' of grass monoculture .

[Aryan Lord]

Alongside the Carnation the Rose is my favourite flower in all its stunning varieties.IMO it is the Aryan of the flower world.Thanks for the URL Livewire.Good to see you back. :)

[Border Ruffian]

My folks have a couple of rose bushes, but I don't know what variety they are. In the fall they have "rosehips" all over them. Read somewhere that rosehips have more Vitamin C by weight than any other fruit.

There's a thin layer of flesh inside the skins. It's bitter and very fibrous, no pleasure to eat, really. They're sweeter as you get later into the fall, but I read that they have less vitamin C when they sweeten. You don't get a lot of material from them, so they aren't handy for making a pie or canning, unless maybe you have a whole field of bushes and a lot of sugar.

Keep it in mind. Extremely high Vitamin C content. When times get hard, and you can't go buy 4 limes for a dollar, unless you're in the south, rose bushes could be very valuable to your family's health. They actually taste ok in late fall, but again you get less C vitamin when they've ripened completely. It tastes a little like a cross between a strawberry and a lime.

[Glenda]

I agree with you all, roses are great plants.

I highly recommend www.vintagegardens.com for an incredible variety of roses. I have grown 3 of their giant ramblers as well as an Eglantine, Anne of Geierstein which reached a height of ten feet in only a few years!
http://www.vintagegardens.com/cgi-bin/class.pl?SRCH_CLASS=E&SHOW_CLASS=Y&id=2c7d6f2c0c5c

Glenda

[Aryan Lord]

This is a great thread. I wonder where Livewire has got to?