Creating your own garden is about creating spaces where you feel at home in nature. Regardless of the style, design, or size, it’s about the joy a garden presents. Once begun, the small incremental rewards from your work brings a new forever changing landscape into being.

Gardening, is a simple, honest pastime, a powerful way to honour nature and a vast canvas for self-expression. The joy of expressing oneself in the garden is satisfying, but also transformative. Like an artist, musician, or craftsperson, to lose oneself in the creative play of gardening is an opportunity to find ourselves. The care we give our gardens polishes our character, motivates and uplifts; a personal restoration of sorts I’ve found.

“I like gardening — it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.”
 

Alice Sebold

For many people, being in the garden is a special time spent in a safe place. It is my go-to space where troubles melt away just by doing those mundane jobs and connecting with nature. It allows your mind to settle and resume a more creative edge that is easy to lose in our increasingly busy world.

A recurring day in the garden is where you might step out for a moment to find yourself hours later, deep in thought, hot and thirsty with a massive pile of weeds built up – exhilarated. Your hands have been working, and your mind is free to ponder the next great idea.

Time passes, and all the bare root roses are now unrecognisable as new anymore. The flush of blooms from Spring and early summer has long faded and been trimmed, so now many new buds and roses are beginning to delight with their colour and vigour once more.

The White Garden has been quite successful so far. The idea of restricting the plant palette to mostly white flowering plants amongst silver, grey, and green foliage with English Lavender was a good choice. While the white roses may not look perfect at times because of thrips and rain damage, overall, the garden is fresh, inviting, and colourful.

“I found I could say things with colours that I couldn’t say in any other way – things that I had no words for.”

Georgia O’Keeffe

In future seasons the white garden will become more luminous from the all-white blooms and varied light foliage. I hope to add more structural plants for extra texture, shape, and form: Tree Ferns and White Rhododendrons complemented by Gypsphla, Spirea, Snowdrops with Viburnum, and Buddleia shrubs amongst the classic roses.

“I am trying to make a grey, green, and white garden.
This is an experiment which I ardently hope may be successful, though I doubt it.
. . . All the same, I cannot help hoping that the great ghostly barn owl will sweep silently
across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight the pale garden that
I am now planting, under the first flakes of snow.”

Vita Sackville-West

Come next winter, my exuberant planting will need to be thinned and fine-tuned, as the garden is becoming densely packed with plants, especially now that the ground covers are filling the gaps. Having a wide variety of ground covers makes all the difference to dark spaces under trees and in semi-shaded areas. As well they help to create a more mature look as against having bare earth under the roses and shrubs.

“This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.
And instead of calling it work, realise it is play.” 

Alan Watts

One Rose that will need to be moved due to the vibrant colour is Soul Mate, which grows as a standard and is always in flower. The roses are clustered and solitary in an old-fashioned shape, from lemon to buttery yellow blooms. Soul Mate has a sweet licorice scent and an abundance of bright and colourful roses that bloom continuously. It is not quite right in the colour scheme, so in winter it will be moved to another spot to brighten a different area of the garden.

…good gardening means patience and dogged determination.
There must be many failures and losses, but by always
pushing on there will also be the reward of success.

Gertrude Jekyll

I really just want to be warm yellow light that pours over everyone I love.

Conor Oberst

Soul Mate was bred by Tom Carruth in the USA in 2003 and sold through Weeks Roses. This rose has many names, so the registration name is handy:  WEKvossutono. It is called Soul Mate in Australia, Julia Child in the USA and Absolutely Fabulous in the UK and New Zealand.

Under plantings and ground covers in the chosen colour scheme will make a new garden look more established. The soft greys, silver and pastel green ground covers often have soft mauve and purple flowers which contrast perfectly with salmon, peach and apricot roses.

“Texture and foliage keep a garden interesting through the season. Flowers are just moments of gratification.”

Kevin Doyle

A standout rose this week with spectacular large blooms is Just Joey. The creamy, copper-coloured roses hang elegantly from the weight of the large blooms on the Standard rose. Fortunately, there is plenty of room, as the branches on this Standard rose are long and spread wide.

“We know we cannot plant seeds with closed fists. To sow, we must open our hands.”

Adolfo Perez Esquivel

Just Joey is also growing as a shrub rose and is rarely out of bloom. Both Just Joey roses are new this year and have been magnificent- an unexpected charming and eye-catching display. The branches hold one perfect wavy rose with frilled, wavy petals per stem. Oh, and the perfume is gorgeous as well a luscious fruity scent.

CANjujo is the registration name of Just Joey -a Hybrid Tea Rose from Cants of Colchester, England, in 1972. It was bred by Roger Pawsey, the managing director, in honour of his wife, Joey. It comes as no surprise that the Just Joey Rose was inducted into the Rose Hall of Fame in 1994 and is considered one of the world’s favourite roses.

The voluptuous over-sized blooms of Just Joey has made this rose an extremely popular one for 50 years due to the easy care, heat and disease tolerance – a real winner. Just Joey was inducted into the Rose Hall of Fame in 1994.

Just Joey may need an extra bit of TLC during humid weather and should be fertilised during flowering
or it can tend to ‘run out of puff’ and resort to black-spot.

Diana Sargeant

Penelope is a rose I’ve grown previously that I think will do better in the cooler climate of Orange NSW and does not mind a partial shade position and grows upright to between 100 and 150 Cm tall. The blooms are delicate to view in slight seashell pink to white with yellow stamens and open from gorgeous apricot buds. It is very pretty.

“The best tool in the garden is the knowledge of a gardener.”

Rosa Penelope is a Hybrid Musk Rose bred by the Rev. Joseph Hardwick Pemberton  in the UK in 1924, and introduced into Australia by Hazlewood Bros. Pty. Ltd. in 1925 as Penelope. It is compact, bushy with trusses of fragrant flowers that repeat all season on semi-glossy dark green foliage. According to the rose website Help Me Find we should resist the urge to prune this rose too much.  

The roses highlighted in this post are Jubilee Celebration, Claude Monet, Soul Sister, Just Joey, and Penelope. The Roses are available from Wagners Rose Nursery, Treloar Roses and Silkies Rose Farm.

Content and Images Di Baker January 2025

Title quote by Jim Dodson