For years, I've been growing an increasing number of irritated with the rosebush in our again backyard. For one component, it wasn't definitely no longer a lot a bush as a vine, so every summer time its branches were given insanely lengthy and flopped over underneath the burden of the blossoms, exposing naked spots below and getting within the manner on every occasion you attempted to open the patio door. No count how carefully I pruned it lower again inside the winter, I simply could not get it to grow gently and compactly.
Then, by the point fall came, these branches might be now not only lengthy and straggly, but additionally nearly bald, having out of place all their leaves to black spot. In 2014, I tried pre-emptively spraying all of it season lengthy with a baking-soda answer I'd visible advocated on numerous gardening websites. That did no longer artwork, so I switched to a commercial enterprise fungicide. That nonetheless didn't paintings, so in 2015, I started spraying the bush with fungicide each week as soon because it developed its first leaves. And while that still failed to work, I determined I'd had it with this bush, and I became going to reduce the whole lot down and replace it with a pleasing, compact, easy-care rosebush with a incredible reputation for black spot resistance.
So this yr for Valentine's Day, Brian gave me a card that said,
In other words, he literally promised me a rose garden. He couldn't very well give me the rosebush itself as a present in the middle of February, but he gave me his word that this year, for sure, the old rosebush would go and a new one would take its place. He even came up with a design for extending our patio to help the new bush blend into its surroundings. (And, if you look carefully at the picture, you can see that he included our two kitties peering out the glass door at the new addition to the yard.)
Now, as I've noted, Brian and I are normally a bit slow when it comes to getting projects done around the house and yard. But Brian promised that this particular project would get done this spring, and he was as good as his word. Earlier this month, we went out to a local garden center and bought a Knock Out rosebush—a variety that's compact, easy to care for, and very resistant to diseases, including black spot. And last weekend, when the weather was clear, we got it into the ground.
As you can see, Brian also stuck to his original design idea about extending the patio. He figured if he was going to do it at all, it would be a lot easier to do it before putting the rosebush in the ground than after, so he spend some time digging into the slope next to the patio and building a small dry-stone wall using some of the leftover pavers from our patio project.
The unusual thing about this job was that it was kind of done from the top down: he started by laying out the pavers directly on the ground around the planting area, and when he reached a spot where the ground was too low to support them, he dug out the dirt until there was room to add another layer of bricks underneath. He also didn't attempt to use any sort of mortar, so the only thing really holding the wall in place is the weight of the bricks and the dirt piled against them. And because the pavers aren't completely identical in size and shape—as we discovered when laying the patio itself—they didn't quite meet up evenly on all four sides. So the finished wall isn't exactly level, and there's one spot against the wall where Brian had to lay a brick in edgewise to fill in a gap. But you'd never notice it from a distance.
So there it is: my new rose garden. Now all I have to do is wait for them to start blooming. The plant was big enough when we bought it that I'm hoping for blooms the first year, but we might have to wait until next year for Brian's sketch to be realized in full.
