Garden Update

With the semester winding down, architecture projects have been keeping me out of the garden and up late, and as always, sets my periodic insomnia into high gear.I mostly see the garden at night, when I return home,except for the early morning walk through that I have made a routine while letting the dogs run around. This much enjoyed morning walk give me the chance to commune with the roses, stop and cut a few blooms if I wish, curse at thrips, and see which seeds I randomly scattered have decided to come up....in the wrong places. I check on my slowly dying Mme Isaac Pereire and still limping Archduke Charles, and stick my whole face into huge blooming candelabras of Abraham Darby hoping to imprint that heavenly fruity scent directly into my brain. The success stories of this week, other than the aforementioned Abraham (who really is splendid this year after a murderous pruning from  6 ft to 2.5 ft in height in January) is Baronne Prevost. I bought her in September from ARE, and I have my first bloom today! Light in scent, but a very pretty rose. Bushier, and putting out a huge bud for a plant just as young as the Baronne is my Paul Neyron, a rose that I can't seem to find a picture of that does not make me swoon. I am looking forward to this bloom more than any other in the garden, especially after RdV kicked the bucket. Clotilde Soupert has two candelabras of buds, and I just can't get enough of those sweet blush pink blooms, and three buds and a bloom on a very tiny Capitane Dyell de Granville. My gladiolus are showing promise this year, both the normal and the antique Byzantine type that I yanked out of the Georgia clay by the shovelful. Those glads carried a racist slang name in the low hills of South Georgia, where they were most often found around the tenant houses of  African American families, but my Grandmother loved them and just called them "those old wild glads." Now they grow in my yard, and they look pretty happy. I am hoping after the next couple of weeks, after the big push for finals is over, I can spend a few days working diligently on correcting the flaws in my garden and putting in the finishing touches. And sleeping. Lots of sleeping.