Roses 2/10/08

Hybrid Teas:

Royal Highness
Opening Night
Oregold
Camelot
Queen Elizabeth (San Antonio)
Peace
Just Joey (San Antonio)

Shrub Roses:

Mutabilis (San Antonio & Lockhart)
Maggie

Polyantha:

Clotilde Soupert
Cecile Brunner

China Rose:

Louis Philippe

Other:

Fortune's Double Yellow
Rosa Banksia - white & yellow (San Antonio)

Unidentified:

Shrub rose from Emilia's house on Bois D'arc St - very fragrant deep red flowers
Rambler with single pink flowers, not fragrant - house on Cibilo St in Lockhart
Shrub with deep burgandy flowers, blooms profusely in spring

fire damage

Just Joey Hybrid Tea Rose

Just Joey is one of my favorite roses in the San Antonio garden. The bush is not spectacular, though attractive for a hybrid tea, but it's the flowers I love. They're a rich apricot color when they open, fading to pale gold as they age. The fragrance is full and sweet.

When the afternoon sunlight caught this bloom as I worked at my desk this afternoon, I couldn't resist grabbing the camera. The bloom to the left of the illuminated Just Joey is from a bush that was in the yard when I bought the house. I believe it's the grandiflora Queen Elizabeth. There is only a faint fragrance, which is a major drawback far as I'm concerned, but the double flowers are nicely formed and grow on long, straight stems, great for cutting.

Bolero Romantica Rose

The roses really never stopped blooming in San Antonio, but there was a short period of dormancy in Austin. All the bushes are now loaded with buds, but only Bolero had open blooms. Here are a couple I picked to bring into the house.

Bolero is one of the Romantica varieties, introduced in 2005 by the House of Meilland. In my garden, the flowers are white, with barely pink centers when they first open, turning a delicate shade of pink as they age. In photos I've seen of the Bolero rose grown in other gardens, the color is pure white. The intense fragrance is similar to that of the Apothecary Rose or rosewater.

Prius Does More Environmental Harm than Hummer

Things aren't always what they seem ...

Chris Demorro writes in the The Recorder (Central Connecticutt State University) that it costs $3.25 per mile to produce a Prius (expected lifetime of 100,000 miles), compared with $1.95 per mile (expected lifetime of 300,000 miles) to produce a Hummer. Worse, from an environmental point of view, the production of the Prius battery is highly destructive. And the advertised 60 mpg city, 51 mpg highway gasoline consumption of the Prius turns out to be misleading, because the tests that produced these results were done under unrealistic conditions.

The author suggests purchasing a Toyota Scion xB (production cost of $0.48 per mile) or a Chevy Aveo, which gets mileage comparable to the Prius's under realistic driving conditions.

http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/editorial/print_item.asp?NewsID=188

Chain Saw Madagascar

Me cutting up a tree that fell across the road at Altamira

This is for my dear husband

This is Damien, beaming in from the 188th dimension.  Photo by Beth Gwinn