Pictured here amongst the kalanchoe. I discovered the first bloom out this morning & picked it because it was partly hidden amongst the wet fronds and you couldn't see its face. I popped it amongst a pot of kalanchoe to get a better go at photographing it. I hope you like it. The proper name is Iris unguicularis, such an ungainly name, this one has the extra name of "cretensis" because of the splochiness and irregular pattern. I have a clump growing at the feet of a very tall (at least 10 ft) rose bush called "Cannes Festival" which is a gorgeous deep gold, but they don't really compliment each other, there's too much space between their levels of production. The iris compliments a couple of miniature roses instead.

This rose always produces heaps of hips quite early in the season, often there's roses & hips at the same time. Its quite a nice looking rose - rose pink in small clusters - on a chunky well leafed shrub. I could imagine this making a wonderful & impenetrable hedge

as it gets quite tall - perhaps 7 ft high. If you want to see how the rose looks, take a look in my lengthy list of rose galleries. This one grows along the horse-yard fence - Dick had to move the fence back a metre and electrify it, the horses kept trimming all the roses & he grew tired of my complaining, especially when they cleaned up all the buds of a spring-only flowering rose!

I love this rose, the bush is so compact and neat in the garden. This one was planted alongside a garden seat and its a rose that gets noticed because of this. The bush stays quite small - about a metre tall and wide, and the blooms keep well in all weathers. The colours change with the season, in spring there's more of a blush pink and now in the autumn it's more of a pale gold. As you would expect of a favourite rose, it is scented.

One of the last few hybrid teas left in the rose garden. A good performer with a luscious scent but not that well known. My bush is 17 years old being in the first group of roses that got planted in the original section of the garden before I started expanding annually. I started with 120 roses of various types and now there's more than 500. Dick won't let me extend the garden, so to add something new something old gets shovel pruned. At present I'm wandering around the garden looking for spots for 3 new additions - Fragrant Delight will be safe - for now.

As well as the attractive leaves, there's no thorns so its a difficult one to train upright and naturally trails making it an excellent choice for a weeping rose and with some help, great for an archway or anywhere there's traffic. The blooms are borne at the ends of canes in small clusters. You need to keep it dead-headed, the blooms don't drop off neatly. The flowers are a flush pink and semi-double. Mine shares a trellis with a beautiful deep blue clematis and that helps lace Renae to the trellis.

We planted this in the corner of a paddock and it has taken off. It will grow into quite a large shrub because every cane that comes in contact with the soil puts out roots and grows as well. This is the time of year it blooms & this particular shot is of buds about to open. I had to pick a sprig and photograph it on our side balcony, the spot where it grows was exposed to gale-force winds at the time of my stroll around the garden.