What a good year for the roses
Many blooms still linger there
The lawn could stand another mowin’
Funny I don’t even care
As you turn to walk away
As the door behind you closes
The only thing I have to say
It’s been a good year for the roses
Sorry, George Jones and Elvis Costello, two fine and notable singers of the song lauding that sweet, sweet flower written by Jerry Chesnut.
Quite literally, in the front and backyard of the Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood, it has not been a good year for the roses.
Click on any gallery photo for a description. Click and hold on the bottom right photo in any gallery for an enlarged slide show.
By this time, the roses my dear wife Karen has so lovingly put into our ground have usually pushed out dozens of reds, whites and yellows. This year, we’ve not one red bloom, and that one out back is traditionally the biggest and burliest of the half-dozen bushes.
No. We’ve had the one each, so-small, white and yellow blooms pictured above.
So we wondered what we see on our annual trek to the Rose Garden a few miles away in Thornden Park, on the fringes of the Syracuse University campus.
I wrote about the E.M. Mills Rose Garden for this week’s Mark It Up community column for Syracuse Public Media site waer.org. If you’d like to read the story and see more photos of the spread, click the link below.
http://waer.org/post/mills-garden-thornden-park-you-can-still-stop-and-smell-roses
Yes, we saw blooming roses. The setting is quite gorgeous.
What harsh winter?
We took our time walking the rows and — you betcha — smelling the roses.
All this, for free.
I always find it hard to believe that there aren’t more people around when we take our annual trip to these sprawling grounds, which hold 3,550 rose plants and are maintained by volunteers of the Syracuse Rose Society.
Has this been a bad year for your roses where you live? Do you have a particular variety of rose that’s your favorite? Do you have a public Rose Garden where you live, and if so, what’s the setting like?
Mark Bialczak 
Pretty Roses!! ❤ your pictures are lovely
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Thank you, my dear friend Leyla. You would go crazy taking photos up here. ❤
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Yeap 😀
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I’m sorry to see your roses are worse for wear from the awful winter you had. Your garden photos are gorgeous.
My rose garden exploded this year. I have a climbing rose, Cecile Bruner that grew an extra twenty feet. The roses came early perfuming the garden in May instead of June. Not sure if a little alpha meal and Epsom salt mix might not help your roses survive the winter if you haven”t already used them.
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An extra 20 feet! That’s mountainous, Tracy! I’ll pass along the alpha meal and Epsom salt mix tip to Karen for sure. I’m not certain what’s in the pre-made that we buy off the shelf. 🙂
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If you want to make your own, it’s 4 cups of alpha meal mixed with 1/4 cup of Epsom salt.
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Cool. Thanks for the formula. 🙂
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Love your flower photos, Mark. Sorry Mother Nature wasn’t more cooperative. I know I looked forward to the blooms each year when we lived in Central New York. 😉
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Yes, of course, we have to take advantage of our warm months up here, Judy, as you did for decades. 🙂
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The Rose gardens look extra beautiful with your lovely Karen there looking and smelling their sweet scents mingling in the air. I am not sure why but some places like our Clintonville Park of Roses and your E.M. Mills Rose Garden tended by the Syracuse Rose Society know how to prepare the soil snd somehow have special “secret skills.” 🙂 ( We have Master Gardeners around Columbus.)
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I’m glad to hear you have your special Clintonville Park of Roses, Robin. We need these to relax and take in the gifts these flower provide. 🙂 ❤
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What a beautiful rose garden to wonder through! I think it was the dreadful winter that caused things to bloom late or not bloom at all.
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Yes, the winter threw off all the timing, indeed, Lisa. 😦 But the big garden here bounced back, thanks the hard-working volunteers. 🙂
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My neighbor’s roses are doing okay. I’ve seen them do better, but they’re okay. Mom’s did great earlier this year, better than now.
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Odd year, MBC.
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I know. I”m not a gardener and even I noticed it.
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as you know, all of my gardening experiences are trial and error, with mixed results. i expect that your roses will return in their full glory next year. the rose garden you visited is very, very pretty.
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Yes, I like your trail and error, let it grown and sprawl and the pretty cottage grounds, Beth. I hope next year we indeed have the return of the rose blooms. I know MDW Karen already is plotting her strategies. 🙂
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Whoa. so much beauty in one place, bro Mark. I haven’t seen very many roses in this area, but I haven’t been out to the areas that have roses much this summer. Unforeseen circumstances prevented doing a lot of fun things. The rose garden at the sister building was destroyed to accommodate the construction crews, so my usual photo op disappeared along with it. The people there sure know how to maintain a rose garden though. It takes a skill I don’t posses.
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The construction crew really had to ruin the rose garden? I suppose that’s progress. Grumble, sis Angie.
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Very beautiful public garden. And I think it is wonderful that it is maintained by volunteers. I know little about gardening but our rose bushes were doing pretty good and now they look a bit sickly. I may have to get a gardener or a knowledgeable neighbor to take a look and give me some advice. I think they may have gotten attacked by some bugs or other blight. 😦
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Oh, a bad turn at mid-season is not a good thing, Deborah. I hope somebody can give you a heads-up on what’s-what. 😦
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My grandmother had beautiful roses but some years they just didn’t bloom. I guess they are temperamental.
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Beautiful and temperamental. You got that right, Kim.
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We do have a blooming rose bush in the front yard (in the shade from the 106 degrees today). I think I’d rather have a blooming onion right now. No, no, Outback’s service is wretched. My son got a rose in soil at church years ago and we planted it, and son of a gun, it took. But they ain’t got nothin’ on those roses in your pics.
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I’m glad to hear your blazing roses are alive, Kerbey. Good gravy that’s hot. Yeah, this garden up here is pretty darn pretty.
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I have never been able to keep a rose bush alive. Such a shame.
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It’s not easy, GP! 🙂 Only my wife’s touch allows it to happen at our house.
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It has been so long I walked into a garden. Lovely photos!
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Sorry you are garden-light these dayss, Prajakta. 😦
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Aw. Your pictures remind me of my late grandfather. Roses were his favorite, and he put so much time and care into tending to his. Lovely, Mark.
Somehow the Chicago Botanic Garden manages to eke out roses even when the conditions for them are at their worst. I wish I had photographs to show you. If you every come out this way, I would put the garden on your list of must-sees.
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Sounds like a must-see in the Windy City, Karen. I’ll remember that!
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I haven’t seen many roses here this year either. It must not be a good year for roses here as well.
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It must be going around, PJ! 😦
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My rose bush never did bloom this year, but then it’s in a bad location that doesn’t get enough light. My girls were supposed to come over early in the summer to help me move it, but then we had that neighbor problem and I didn’t want them around for a few weeks. Then it got too hot to be working out front. Hopefully I can move it in the spring – it would look so beautiful next to the new(er) front porch.
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Get it transplanted next year, CM, and watch it bloom. That will be great by the new(er) front porch!
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Planning on it.
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Roses are my fav! My Mom has over 50 varieties growing and they are her extended babies. Growing up with her obsession for them the sweet smelling flowers as one of my friends put it-“Smells like a funeral Parlor” in here??? BaHaHaHa. Just beautiful…Sorry YDW Karen’s did not fair so well but there is next year! Gatorette.
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Yes, better luck next year for ours, I agree. I think your mom with 50 varieties, that’s fantastic, Gatorette!
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She really has the green thumb!!! This rose garden is a 30 year venture for her! Have a great day Terp!
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That’s a great thing about life, finding a joy and sticking with it. You have a great day, too, Gatorette. 🙂
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Beautiful photos of the roses. Amazingly my roses seem to do well, despite the lack of water. Must be all the sun. The most beautiful field of roses I ever laid eyes on was actually just outside of Phoenix. You wouldn’t think they would do well there, but there were acres and acres of them – all so healthy. My favorite rose, actually I have several, is a lavender rose my son planted, then I have one where the blooms look those striped peppermint candies. I also have another tea rose that blooms yellow, but as the bloom ages it changes to a brilliant coral.
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Peppermint candies, that sounds amazing, SD. All of them do, actually. We had a variety named All That Jazz, a brilliant red, that we loved, but it didn’t take after two seasons of yield, unfortunately. 😦
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I have 2 bare roots roses I bought 3 years ago, and have yet to plant them. And they bloomed this year, still in the plastic wrappers. Go figure!!!!
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Heat and humidity? I am trying to figure, as you can tell, SD. 😉
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Thats’ kind of what I figured too!!!
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Beautiful pictures Mark. You know I didn’t think Ottawa had a rose garden so I googled it. I was surprised to find that the “Heritage Rose Garden” is very popular It is a part of the Central Experimental Farm (CEF) a unique Federal government establishment here in Ottawa. Because Ottawa is the capital and Canada has a lot of agriculture, we have a huge government dept that just experiments with crops and plants. It used to be in the outskirts of the city but Ottawa has grown around it so there are thousands of acres of experimental crops basically in the south central part of the city. Driving along beside the highrise buildings you suddenly find yourself in a corn field that goes for miles. I knew they experimented with non-food crops but I didn’t realize they had a whole section devoted to ornamental flowers and roses. Apparently this section is staffed mostly by volunteers but they still do a lot of experiments and plant development here. Here’s a small part of the ornamental gardens at CEF:
http://www.friendsofthefarm.ca/gardens5.html
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That’s a beautiful part of your city, Paul. I clicked and was impressed. Thank you! Great idea in Ottawa, I say.
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Not sure about roses, but it’s been a good year for mosquitos. But then, I say that every summer. I like your town’s roses better than my town’s mosquitos.
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It’s been a big skeeter year at our swampy league golf course as well, Scott. I broke down and bought some Off! finally. Yeesh. Buzz off, will ya?!
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It’s not been a bad year for my rose bush, but then, I feed it all the time, coffee grounds, egg shells, banana peels. Normally, I’d ask you what kind of sun the roses get, but you said normally they’d flourish, so they must be planted in a good spot. Try some fertilizer?
We don’t have a rose garden as shown in your photos. (Totally gorgeous, I’d go a lot!) But we do have some rose gardens attached to other places, like the art museum, or the cemetery of the rich and famous. And of course, we have a conservatory and botanical gardens, which I enjoy going to, but not so much my family or friends, soooo…Maybe I’ll do that one day before the weather cools too much — go over to the conservatory and snap some photos…Nice idea you’ve planted! 😉
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Our roses have been outstanding until this year, Joey. I think it was the lack of a melt for four months straight last winter. Or maybe the front garden HAS gotten too crowded and the other plants are blocking the sun, and Ellie B got too rambunctious with the back bush, with which she has free access. Or a combination thereof. MDW Karen does feed them, though.
I’m glad I gave you the idea to visit your cool rose repositories in Indy before it gets too fall-ish. 🙂
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It’s beautiful, Mark!
I’m not sure about rose gardens here–there are many beautiful public gardens that also have roses, and Longwood Gardens does have a rose garden, too.
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When we travel, MDW Karen and I look for rose gardens, Merril. There’s a great one at the Mission in Santa Barbara. This one in Syracuse measures up to it, though. Personally, my favorite has been the one in Portland, Ore., poartly because of the way it stood on a big hill overlooking downtown, with Mount Hood past that!
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