Sydney is having a very wet February. The dry spring had almost erased the memory of having days of straight, driving, soaking rain. But they're back, and not a moment too soon.
Statistically, autumn and winter are the wettest seasons in Sydney. The implications for rose gardeners include pros and cons. Obviously, you don't need to water so much. I always find rain better than watering, too - the bushes just respond better to it.
Rainy weather is also ideal for applying granular fertilisers. February is a critical month for feeding. A strong supply of nutrients will promote strong new flowering stems that will mature in autumn. Skip the feeding and you skip a large crop of flowers.
The main danger from rain is fungal disease, which reaches prominence in late autumn. By then it doesn't matter - I suspect the plant doesn't much care about its leaves because winter is approaching. In early autumn it does matter, because healthy foliage will reward you with beautiful blooms from March to June.
Drainage problems also become ugly in prolonged rain. Sometimes there is an early warning sign, which is usually the wilting of young stem ends in wet weather. If the lower soil remains wet, the wilting becomes irreversible and the bush invariably dies.
I've had no luck trying to rescue bushes from poor drainage. I've tried potting the plants and raising the bed by lifting the rose and adding rose mix underneath the rose. This month I lost Duchesse de Brabant, a tea rose I was trialling for the first time. I had planted it too deeply, using rose mix that tends to sink and compact a little over time. This led to it growing in a 'sink', and prolonged rain caused it to wilt. Danger. Trying to raise the bed was just too much for the poor bush. I'd have felt more like an idiot if I wasn't already sure that the bush was dying from poor drainage.
So, unless someone can point out a solution, I'm concluding that drainage is a matter of prevention, not cure. I'm still a huge fan of using rose mix for planting, but I now make sure that I plant the bush in a more raised position. Pending the winter orders, I've bought an old favourite (Abraham Darby) from Swanes to take the late Duchess' place in my display bed.
I've had two readers email me, asking where my section on summer pruning is. The answer is that I'll have to update my site to mention it, but basically I don't believe in it. That concept fell from favour in Australia a long time ago, and in cooler climates it was rarely practiced at all.
The old wisdom was that a summer prune would let a rose bush focus less of its food supplies on all of its spring growth and promote new flowering shoots with large blooms. That idea makes more sense in Australia than it does elsewhere, but only because established bushes can reach 8 feet or more by midsummer.
The modern wisdom is that a rose is not dormant in summer. Cutting off food-producing stems and foliage will hurt more than help.
The compromise (if you need to rein a bush in) is to simply cut the flowers with long stems. This is a more gradual, low impact method that doesn't hurt flowering at all, in my experience.
Photos
Not much show and tell for this month, really. Late in the month my Monsieur Tillier and Guy de Maupassant bushes have exploded into bloom. I'm now getting reliable repeat blooms from two of my old-world roses. This is Souvenir de la Malmaison, a bourbon:
And this is an opening bud from Souvenir d'un Ami, which gets lighter in colour as it ages:
And to finish, here's cheers for Mme Alfred Carriere. It was always reputed to be a strong climbing rose, but as this photo shows, it's managed to get on top of my neighbour's rampant potato vine! And that's no mean feat. Take a bow, Madame.
Until next month,
Daniel.