I like Bolero too. Really nice rose.

Fragrant, healthy, and beautiful.

November 13 and a few things are in color. Pink Petticoat X Nessie. This is mini X [(R. Brunonii X R. Gigantea) X Mlle Cecile Brunner]. VERY fragrant, excellent repeat bloom.

I need to weed many pots. Thankfully Wee Willie Winkie has his own agenda.

The weather has been SO odd, even 1-72-1Hugonis flore plena is setting more buds.

And, a Grey Pearl the rain didn't spoil.

A lot of roses are in bloom out there in the garden. Fall produces some of the better blooms here, I think, as the cooler weather revives them after summer's extreme, arid heat and without the clamminess of spring that balls and discolors the petals. While the shrubs may look beat up from that heat, the flowers are gorgeous .

All the Chinas are going, ditto the Bourbons, some of the Teas ('Lady Roberts' and "Arcadia Louisiana Tea" have been particularly lovely) and most of the Hybrid Teas, and there are other blooms here and there. Here is a little bouquet of hybrid teas I picked before yesterday's rainstorm (the scent is wonderful!):

("Marlowe Soft Orange" in the center, 'Sutter's Gold' top right, 'Fred Howard' in his yellow mode on either side of MSO, and 'Lemon Spice' at the bottom on either side)

Nice photos - good to see things plugging away in November! I've got my monkshood - I think that's the only perennial in bloom.

For annuals, my geraniums are looking GREAT, my impatiens are hanging on (which looks especially nice as I use them as edging, so my beds still look okay as they pretend to be still alive lol. At least from a distance!). I have some Blue Bedder (I think???) salvia that just doesn't know when to quit, and quite serendipitously is right next to some yellow and orange giant marigolds, which then line up with some orange zinnias still going strong. So a nice little swath of color going on there.

Then there's this

This only adds to my new-found respect for wax begonias lol. Tough little suckers! I don't even remember having any in those pots on top of this wall! There are some about 6 feet away that must have seeded across the patio!

:)

Dee

Still no freeze here in Portland Oregon. Fuchsias going strong as are most Salvias.

Gee Porkchop, I could have said the same! I transitioned from perennials to shrubs and trees and find it very satisfactory. Like you, I don't seem to have the desire to spend hours fussing over my plantings and I tend to think more about what I could or need to do than actually getting it done! I've become very fond of conifers, especially cryptomerias, and broadleaf evergreens. Now, in my early 70's, I'm enjoying watching my trees and shrubs mature and contemplating which will be need to be culled before I no longer have view from inside my house or for that matter a view of my house from the outside!

I can so relate to these posts. yesterday my thoughts turned, once again, to losing more lawn and my increasing disinterest in perennials. I enjoy the scale, textures and permanence of trees and shrubs more and more. Ive always incorporated woodies into my garden but now i want them to be foreground, not background. yesterday i had a brainstorm to remove the 15 or so June hostas from under the fringe tree and replace with …..what? Something with fall color, rabbit, deer resistant, shade tolerant- low grow sumac? This will keep me up at night for weeks. Or just bedding impatients? The cost of a new tree could keep me in annuals for a decade.

It is good to ruminate about these things with gardening companions (of long standing)instead of reading prescriptive magazine articles. I too am in my 7th decade.

marie

The only pure white rose I’ve found to be healthy in my garden with it’s high blackspot pressure and frequent thrip issue would be Darlow’s enigma.

I imagine the discussion at hand is about repeating roses, but my favorite white rose -- indeed, one of my favorite roses -- is 'Madame Hardy'. Simply unmatched, for bloom form, and a lovely scent and good health as well.

My favorite white rose is Pope John Paul 2. It also happens to be the Saddleback Caterpillars favorite. I have been badly stung more than once, by the little greedy guts hiding underneath the leaves. They blend right in. Its okay, they can have the leaves, I will take the blooms. It blooms often and smells heavenly. It does get a little black spot but I wouldnt be without it.

I'm so jealous of all of you with lovely Savannahs! I have one that is 3 years old and still disappointing me. I will probably give her another year to see if that makes the difference. Lovely, healthy, vigorous shrub but small, sparse blooms and they are quite flat.

That foliage really is something, especially with no spray at all in November — clean leaves like that make the whole plant look good even between flushes. I agree with Markay about giving it some support while it gets established, since those big clusters can pull the canes over. It's definitely moved up my list for a spot where I want a healthy, fragrant shrub that can get big.

Dianela, your Savannah is beautiful and healthy. I tried twice and both times mine weren’t great, but I do remember the wonderful fragrance. My experience was prob similar to Claudia’s.

Thanks, Markay! I'll be sure to get after mine more aggressively, given that it'll be living in a 15 gallon pot :-D

Thank you for this thread @porkchop_z5b_MI. I added one Mister and 4 Mrs. this year. I ordered them from Home Depot with shipping direct from the grower and they were big enough to give me confidence in their survival, but not so big as to be daunting when dighing the planting holes. They were pruned back hard for shipping, so no berries this year. I worried that setting Mr. Poppins back more in tge shade might be a problem so I appreciated hearing y’all’s experiences and fell much more vinfident about how I’ve arranged them!

uhoh. Mr. Poppins has dropped all his leaves already. Hope that is normal this early.

No frosty grass here so far, and the prediction I just saw had us frost free up to Nov 8, which was as far as the daily predictions went. However, you really warm up. Our highs for the last few days have been in the 50s, but warm to the low 60s on Nov 7, my birthday. Can you guess how ancient I'll be then? It's too awful to think about......81 years old. How the !@#$ did I get this old? No way!! An 81 year old teenager. And you get colder by day on Nov 7. Only gardeners would have this discussion, and maybe farmers. Yes, we still have the blasted potato drop on New Year's Eve, and most farmers in this area don't even grow potatoes. Their land is too valuable for low profit crops like potatoes, so they grow hybrid onion seed and hybrid sweet corn seed. My step dad also had a mint still and he grew peppermint for candy companies. The mint was distilled into oil for those companies to use. I tell you that your sinuses were cleared when you drove down that country road, and the mint still was blasting away. That was many moons ago, but a fun memory. Another was having to come to a complete stop for a bit while a sheep rancher drove his sheep right down the road and harvested fields to the winter pastures. Guys would be driving the sheep on horses and in cars, and on motor scooters. I'm talking hundreds of sheep at a time, so you sat in your car for a good bit. Well, I'm a geezer, so I can drone on...... back to roses. Greatgreatgrand Nanadoll

A while back before the deer

Forgot about the hydrangeas. This limelight colored up nicely although the picture doesn’t do it justice

mixed bed of fall colors

Very pretty, late October pics @gardenho_z5.

Houzz is a west coast company - I have one more hour!!!

Abelia schumannii is a flowering machine. It runs from late May to frost.

Fuchsia 'Porphyrio' survived this cold last winter with no extra mulch, so I think it's fully established, unless we have another once-every-30-year winter like 2013-2014. This has some R. regia blood, so is heat resistant compared to the pure F. magellanica cultivars.

Hesperantha 'Deborah's Red' from Cistus, though it's been a while since they offered it.

Some Hydrangeas are still going.

Lastly, another potentially tender plant that made it through this winter with no special protection, to roughly 5F multiple times, Bomarea hirtella/edulis.

A bit more detail since I was in a rush last night...this was my absolute, positively, last try with this plant. So the fact it's been perennial and flowering now for 3 years in a row shows why it pays to be persistent. I've experimented with this (fickle in the mid-Atlantic) species all the way back to my parent's house garden in the late 1990s! As I've discussed with other plants that are in some way marginal for one's climate, the secret now was growing it out from seed to select for a 'local cultivar' that is happy under your own conditions. And it was not even my first attempt to do that. I had first tried maybe 6-7 years ago with seed bought from Tobias Spanner's RPS. I got only maybe one or two really weak growing seedlings that amounted to nothing - didn't get past a few inches. Then I tried again, and I can't even remember where this seed came from: either Jelitto or Alplains, probably. A few died as seedlings when it got hot - they didn't like that. (My understanding is that this basically comes from a central American highland climate! You wouldn't expect them to be even zone 8 hardy, much less zone 7! It's sort of similar to the mystery of Alstroemerias, to which it is related, except some of those are at least native to the colder Andes of Chile.) Finally I got 2 really well established plants. Then this 'almost as cold as polar vortex' winter happened and took out 1, leaving this one.

Final warning about this plant, from when I tried to move it from my parent's garden to the townhouse I owned for a while. It makes fingerling potato-like tubules that are counter-intuitively not propagative. They are just for starch storage. Apparently whatever regrows in the following years is smaller and more fibruous, and if you move a clump, you have to move at least one of those. They detach easily from the 'bulbs'. Back in 2002 I tried to regrow a few of those bulbs, to no avail.

Last edit: I know for sure the first time I tried this circa 1999, the seed came from Chiltern Seed in the UK. How I miss the days when that was a carefree process. I believe I should give credit where credit is due!

Saint Swithun is not the greatest rebloomer, but he does have a few lovely fragrant blooms on him now. Ambridge Rose is an absolute stunner and blooms late into fall or early winter every year now.

Being the curator of a collection of what I would call early English Rose heritage varieties has given me insight into how well certain varieties perform in this climate in particular. Ambridge Rose is a stunner and a star here. Everyone who sees her is impressed.

James Galway is finishing his 3rd season and has decided to become a rampant climber, outcompeting Saint Swithun and Lordly Oberon here for length of new canes. I am going to have to do some serious training on him next spring and expect that he is just coming into his own now.

Claire Rose is also indicating that she wants to be a climber in year four, so she will join four others in close proximity in a unusual and rustic climbing rose bower. I am interested to see what it becomes.

Lordly Oberon is another wonderful surprise here. He bloomed preetty much all summer, still some gorgeous, large, fragrant, cupped pale pink flowers now. I fail to understand why this rose never became popular, at least in a drier climate, he is superb.

Rick

Lovely pics!

Rosylady, I agree with you and roseseek that Tamora is a strong match — that soft peachy-orange color and compact, floribunda-like habit look very much like the three you already grow. Markay's note about Soul Sister and black spot is a useful warning too, since that kind of disease pressure would put me off in a humid summer as well. If you do try Tamora in that same spot, do you find it stays as short and tidy in your zone 8 garden as it does in the photo?

The A.R.T.S. regions are so weird to me. I’m in the Humid Subtropic (Cfa) region which has testing sites in Texas and Louisiana While the Humid Continental (Dfa) Region has a test site at Swarthmore PA which is only a bit over 2 hours away. It is really hard for me to believe the Cfa region picks are better choices for me than the Dfa region picks.

True Confidence is not on the list for my region, but it certainly looks like a good one.

Markay, it may not have been tested in your region.

I greatly appreciate the effort taken by the A.R.T.S. founders and working rosarians who evaluate the roses, but their conclusions are not gospel canon. I do study their selections carefully, and appreciate the information I glean.

Reminiscent Coral, an A.R.T.S. awarded rose for my district, Dfa, proved to be a bad enough black spotter to get shovel pruned, but the flower is outrageously lovely to me.

Do I bite the bullet and keep it anyway, even if it needs spraying if it doesn't mature out of its first year fungus test failure in my garden? That's yet to be decided.

Moses.

This was the healthiest rose I ever shovel pruned. It was free of blackspot, bloomed it’s head off with quick repeat. The blooms lasted a long while too. I removed it because the color of the blooms and blotchiness didn’t do it for me, but you can see how healthy the foliage was.

@rosecanadian, I can’t say I ever noticed any fragrance.

@rosecanadian

I notice that many fragrant roses smell best on first day when opening in warm or hot weather. As it gets cooler in fall I see fragrance lessens and dissappears. . I used to not even smell my roses or just occassionally smell them. I think many roses have fragrances the common gardener does not notice, like me in the past. I think you really need to tune into smelling them and learning when they peak in fragrance to understand that particular rose fragrance.

Pinkerbelle may have a wonderful fragrance in warm weather, just as it starts opening, if caught at the right time.

I realize there is light, moderate & strong fragrances in roses. I am sure Pinkerbelle has some fragrance. I read it was strong & moderate, a Verbena-citrus scent. Love to check it out.

I smell many of my roses sonetimes daily, now, searching for scents. Would be fun to notice and identify different notes in their fragrances.

My interest in rose fragrance has been peaked by you, Carol! Thank you! A whole new world ”to find joy in fragrances has unfolded for me.”

Hopefully, Pinkerbelle will be a lovely fragrance we can enjoy!

Oh, I'm glad I could lead you by your nose. lol :) :) Rose fragrances are truly joyful, as you said. :) Yes, I'm hoping for a great fragrance from Pinkberbelle.