What’s new
Get your Soil Ready for Planting
Want fabulous plants? You need healthy soil. While garden soil will never be glamorous, it is the foundation for our gardens. What you can see going on with your roses above the ground is largely determined by what goes on beneath your feet that is all but invisible to you….
Good Pink Roses for Marin – Gertrude Jekyll
If we were sitting with David Austin, having a spot of tea, and he remarked that he could not think of any other rose with quite so strong a fragrance as ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, I should rather think we would take note. Indeed, ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ is one of the best and…
The Powdery Blight
Warm days and cool nights are happening now. These are perfect conditions for powdery mildew to thrive in the garden. This common disease is easily recognized by the talcum-powder like appearance on new and old leaves, tender new shoots, some flowers, and fruits. It affects a huge range of plants,…
Good White Roses for Marin – Irresistible
This month I’ll venture off into a land I’ve not had much experience with, miniature roses. Although I planted lots of them for my mother, (oh yes, watered, pruned and fertilized too), they were HER roses, and did very well there. However for me, not so great. But there are…
Gophers are really bad guys
The bane of many gardeners, especially rose-growing ones, is the gopher. While this voracious pest loves roses, they’re not fussy – in fact, there isn’t a lot they DON’T like! The pocket gopher is named for the external, fur-lined check pouches the critters use to carry food to their storage…















