My rose gardens...

Stage One: Get rid of the scrub!



Believe it or not... this is going to be my new Tea garden I cleared all the scrub off it today and am half-way through chipping it (see chipper at left). It was a tangled hedge of Mexican Orange (Choiysia ternata), Abutilon, wax flower, honey suckle, bracken fern, and blackberry about 5ft tall, 20ft long and 15ft deep. I like the Mexican Orange so have dug up the suckers and potted them to use in a dedicated Mexican Orange hedge somewhere else. Next step will be to brush cut down the slope more and put some round-up on it... build up a bed with rotted cow manure and lay cardboard and mulch down and then plant the Teas and supporting perenials Gonna take some elbow grease this one But this will be the view from the sunroom so it will be very worth it.

Oh wow! Won't you be fit! Nothing like a bit of bed making or the garden sort to work up a sweat!
It should look beautiful when the roses are all flowering. And from what I am reading the Tea bushes are nice looking shrubs in their own right even without the flowers.
What spacing will you be giving them Tas? Will they need more than 1 metre apart? How many in total?
I think I would like to get a few Teas myself.

You have a few Teas already Deirdre! You sent me one today LOL 'Plantier' is a Tea. [edit... teh rose was actually Mme Plantier which is an alba]

I guess it really depends which Teas I end up getting. The plan is to let them just grow their little hearts out... no pruning, nothing, so they could get pretty huge. I'll leave several metres around them to fill in and then use lots of perenials to fill the gaps. I'd like Echiums at the back to set the Teas off. Duchesse de Brabant will go in first. The whole bed will end up stretching from up near the top of the remaining mound of branches near the chipper down to the about where that bit of bracken is on the far right side and then down the slope all the way to the fence, a distance of about 15m that kind of flares out as you go down the slope (so teh base of the garden is longer than the top up near the house. So I will be able to put quite a lot of Teas in there. I am hoping to use Deb's tripod idea to scatter tripods through it to grow climbing Teas but think a lot are too big for a tripod like this... I really want a Fortune's Double Yellow but don't think I have anywhere for it .

Talking of making beds and Teas, think I need a bex, cuppa and a lie down, all this work is making me tied

The Estate wrote:Talking of making beds and Teas, think I need a bex, cuppa and a lie down, all this work is making me tied

Yeah Thee, a Tea Garden does sound like somewhere where you would drink tea and eat scones! And having a bed thrown in is an extra bonus!!

Hi Billndee,
I saw your comment
.....What spacing will you be giving them Tas? Will they need more than 1 metre apart?......

Just thought I would say a bit about this. This is likely the biggest area people new to teas go wrong. They put them way too close together. Then they have to prune the heck out of them to keep them in the space. Other than very light clipping (liker you clip a hedge) teas do not like to be pruned. If continually hard pruned they will weaken and not preform well.
They are totally different to modern roses in this way.

So how to space tea roses? First thing is don't beleive what you read about their sizes. Most reference books come from the UK, where teas are being grown well out of their prefered warm climate zones. They often grow their teas in hot houses. Also many of the vendors who sell tea roses have not grown them. So they have no idea and simply write down what their book says.
Find someone in Australia, who has a healthy plant of the one you are placeing, make sure they are not pruning it and it is several years old.

With a few exceptions most teas need about 8 feet spacing. Some are very wide, G. Nobannand, Mrs B R Cant, Archiduc Joseph can get 12 ft wide with time. There are a few that stay relatively smaller at around 5 ft wide. And a very few will fit in the space of a HT about a meter wide.

Some people are put off by the size. They are so used to seeing HT's all in a row that they can not visualize ever using a rose with larger dimensions. However, they take up no more room than a bottle brush or other common garden shrubs and can be used in the exact same manor. Remember they are evergreen so they look good year round, and they bloom and bloom and bloom.
I plant mine in garden beds, mixed together with perennials. I also place them into mixed borders with native and other shrubs. They are also excellent for using as hedges either mixed or all one kind, and I love the way mine look that I have placed along fence lines to soften the view. I also have a garden where they are all in a row, they are just further apart than HT's would be placed.
Really they are far more versatile in their placement than HT's and have a lot more garden worthiness when it comes to making an eye pleasing landscape.

Oh to have lots more space

Sprayed the whole area with double strength roundup today.... will leave it and spot spray anything else that comes up.. put down carboard and edging and pile it up with mulch... coming along TheE... I dug a 20m long garden bed, with my tractor, today and planted a line of bearded iris along the driveway too... getting quite a collection of beardies now... only have 180 more metres of driveway to plant out now that's a lot of beardies Got the rest of the pile chipped and will attack it the bed tomorrow to remove the large stumps of the shrubs that were in there previously.

Thank you Cree for your advice on spacing Teas. While reading it I realise your advice extends to other large growing rose varieties too. For example I have found the David Austin's Crocus Rose and Charles Austin need much more space than 1 metre. Twice that area would be more suitable. There are probably a lot more that we don't know about until they are flopping all over their neighbours.

Tasv, there is a beautiful photo of Fortune's Double Yellow on Helpmefind where it looks like it has been clipped into a mound, and it looks so tidy and beautiful. But it only blooms once and it is very prickly. If you grow it, make sure the late frosts don't kill it. I think that is what killed my cuttings of it. Grows easy from cuttings.
I look forward to seeing your Tea garden grow ! My teas are close together but maybe they will grow nicely into into each other, or I will move some out to another spot latter.

The Tea garden has progressed a little more though it has strayed a little from the original idea. Tomorrow the tractor will come out so I can load rocks from down the back paddock into the bucket and bring them up to use in the Tea garden to make low terraces. There is Comtess de Labarthe in there and a row of Rosa Indica Major (funny rose that seems to fit across a lot of different classifications including a Tea) along the fence along the bottom and a few other modern shrubs and a lovely old 'Pax' hybrid Musk. 'Lady Hillingdon' will go in there when it gets bigger and if any of my Mons. Tillier grafts take they too will go in there. With any luck I'll get some more weeds removed tomorrow and some mulch down too.

It sounds great Simon. I look forward to see photos of it latter.
We have rocks around my front garden that I brought up from our creek. They worked out really well and they are good stepping stones for the younger daughter now or for sitting on when you are putting your shoes on.

OMG - I have found muscles that I had forgotten I possessed *walks away hunched like I am 100 years old* Photos will come after next weekend (when I can walk again ).

Its amazing how you don't notice it much till you stand up and walk away.
I look forward to seeing the photos.
My new project was planting some Camellias in the shade in front of my house ( I moved some roses out into the outer garden ). Ray is going to do a pathway in front of them, slowly. He use to be a paver.

Wow, what a fantastic project Simon. I only just caught up on this thread. This will be a project to watch - and we can all enjoy the progress without the pain lol
When I send you a bundle of stuff, I will include some budwood of a couple of teas I've bred - low growers (I hope) for the border.