I’m an excited but newbie gardener.
I grew up with a love of gardening and plants thanks to my Mom, but I never really had my own garden until 2009 when we bought our second home. We started with an empty dirt lot with lots of rocks in it. We had some landscaping guys put in the irrigation system… and then I was off buying roses.
Our is USDA Plant Hardiness zone is 9-10 and our Sunset Western Zone is 18, inland Southern California. We have relatively mild winters and very hot and dry summers (it can get up to 115 degrees F here.) Growing season: mid-Mar. through late Nov. Our climate is a bit chaparral or mediterranean in feel.
Our soil is alkaline clay. The back of the yard gets full sun most of the day (including morning sun) and the front yard gets afternoon sun, to a point.
I’ve always loved roses, I find them very romantic. My first rose was the Hybrid Tea rose, Tiffany, which my grandmother bought for me when I was a child. I have another Tiffany in my yard today! My interest in roses once I had my own garden, though, quickly started to specialize in what are called old or antique roses.
The roses you see in most gardens and big-box nurseries now are Knockouts, Iceberg (floribunda) roses and variations on Hybrid Tea roses. These are lovely, but I quickly started to prefer the fancy bloom look of many of old garden roses (OGRs). The shapes of the bushes were lovely and different and some of them had variable flower colors. You can even find roses that have been around for hundreds of years!
I now have about 65 roses! My favorite classes are Hybrid Perpetuals, Tea-Noisettes, Hybrid Musks, Old Teas and David Austin Roses.
Almost all of my roses were bought via mail order, which I highly recommend! My roses have only been in the ground since late 2009 and some are even younger, but so far, I don’t have to do much to get them to do well, with a few finicky exceptions. The roses seem to really like this area and some even bloom all year even though they are young.
I also am experimenting with irises (especially reblooming bearded irises), narcissus, south african bulbs, lavender, hydrangeas, yarrow, sakura trees, camellias, penstemon, salvia, poppies, cosmos, sedum, western redbud, russian sage and the like. I try when possible to use plants that are somewhat drought tolerant or native (without having plants that rot in my not-so-great-draining clay soil.)