The Red fruits from the garden

The beautiful cherry blossoms last spring has turned out to be a fruitful one. The last days of June is juicy ripe with cherries. Anywhere you drive around Switzerland, you can see ladders leaning onto tall ripening cherry tress. I'm cherrified by my own cherry trees. Day and night nibbling cherries, but they are only once a year. I love my own home grown cherries and I ate them like there's not tomorrow!

Strawberries are one of my favourite seasonal fruits. It can be grown in so many ways; in pots, hanging pots or on the ground. I grow mine in the pots because I don't have straw or hays. Farmers and commercial growers usually grow their strawberries on the ground, layered and support the berries using straw or hay, to avoid fouling, hence it is called strawberries.

Red Currants or Ribes Rubrum is a spring flowering shrub and the juicy red currants are ready for harvest around this time of year. They can be eaten fresh, or kept deep frozen for a long time for later use in fruit cake mixture. They can also be dried for adding into breakfast cereals or liquify and turned into jelly, marmalade or syrup.

Growing roses into the evergreen hedge

Apple Blossom - bought this rose because the name got stuck in my head after Taddy kept posting about her unidentified rose that may or maynot be Apple Blossom. In the end, hers turned out to be Dawson and I ended up with a vigourous multiflora Apple Blossom, growing more than 2 meters in 12 months that I had just planted another one to grow it up a tree because of its long lasting rain resistant blooms. Very pliable stems, beautiful foliage and so far disease free.
New Dawn - the most common rose in Switzerland, and can be seen all over the place scrambling over fences and one of those roses that are sold even by supermarket chains. I once went to shop for food but ended up coming home with a bread and 6 New Dawn. A row of 2 and a half metres wide arch tunnel was later brought in to the eastern side of the garden for New Dawn to greet the raising sun at the break of dawn. The New dawn arch tunnel area is quite narrow as it is a small terraced area which connect the lower ground floor guest room to the steps leading up to the middle kitchen patio terrace which is only one floor building difference. 6 New Dawn in that space proved to be too small for such a rampant grower like New Dawn, throwing canes in all directions with hooked thorns that I had to move them all to several areas. 3 is growing into the hedge and the other 3 scrambling up a tree. One out of the 3 that is growing up a tree is growing in dapple shade of the woodland with no direct sun at all and within a season, had grown in leaps and bounds. This one seem to be doing much better than the other 2 which receive full day sun on a south facing aspect.

Rambling Rector - imagine waking up on Sunday morning and sit underneath the pergola sipping wake up coffee while listenening to birds songs, inhaling the intense fragrance of this rose that's appeared in abundance of trusses?

It must be heavenly, but I didn't know how worthwhile this rose was when I first got it. I had it planted in the hedgerow to scramble the evergreen hedge at the far end of the garden.

A new 3 X3 metre open structure pavilion is now planted with a second rambling rector to ramble and scramble and hopefully it will cover the whole structure as soon as possible.

Thalia Remontant came to the garden by accident. It was a replacement rose after an order that went all confused. The blooms resemble the trusses of white fairy but the plant is huge in comparison. 3 meters tall while the white fairy is so much shorter and and more like a procumbent in character. Thalia is planted at the 90 degrees corner of the hedge to scramble around but that corner had gone a bit thick and very shady for most part of the day. Nevertheless, this rose seem fine with the surrounding green and the white blooms kind of brighten up the dark and boring corner pretty well. .

If my Treasure Trove is to grow straight up stiff like a tree, it can easily reach the height of 5 meters (15 feet) high, and to think that this rose is the offspring of Felipes Kiftsgate, Treasure Trove has the potential to get as enormous as its parent Felipes Kiftsgate. That is how wide this rose has reached weaving and rambling into the evergreen hedge. In wingspan direction the length it covered is double that. I had it cut back because it was in tangle with other roses. The flowers are scented and its trusses and colourings reminded me of trusses on Ghislaine de Feligonde but the leaves are much bigger and the canes are much stiffer than the weepy G.d.F

Next article growing roses up the trees

Every rose has a story

A good old friend of my mum, Aunt Mary, is an old hand at gardening. Only 1 out of her 5 children share her passion towards gardening especially with old garden roses. She's one of those people who appreciate my interest in gardening and understand my enthusiasm about collecting plants. Being in retirement, she and her husband travel frequently to visit their 5 children and grandchildren who live all over the place in europe. If 5 children and 7 grandchildren is not enough to keep her busy travelling and visiting, she also had unofficially adopted me as one of her kids. Your mum said, "if anything happen to me Mary, you will see to it that Rae is not lost by herself," that's what she always repeat to me whenever she saw I'm a little lost navigating my life.

While I am never short of thoughtful people who cared about my well being, aunt Mary is also a big contributor to my garden. Everywhere she go, without fail, there's always something she brought home for my garden, a bag of bulbs from Holland, or cuttings of all sorts from Cyprus or Germany or anywhere she saw plants, she saw me in her head. Over the years, my garden had turned into a zoo of plants, some are still alive and some are dead because I don't know the identity of the plants making it real tricky to provide proper care especially during the freezing cold winter months.

One day she went to visit her daughter in Holland and brought home a tiny 2 inches soft wood cuttings. Over the phone, she said she had taken cuttings from Paul Himalayan Musk, a rose which I wanted to grow into tall trees. She took one cutting for herself and another one is for me but she couldn't manage to take it out of the moist wrappings because immediately when she got home, her ailing husband was admitted to the hospital. She asked me to take care of the 2 cuttings while she gathered her family together to deal with her situation.

I met her half way while she was on the way to the hospital and took the container containing the 2 rose cuttings, brought home, placed it in a small hole mixed with sand and soil mixture at the edge of a shady retaining wall. That was in September 2007.

Few months later, the cuttings took root and survived the winter. Aunt Mary was very happy that I managed to root her cuttings and she was very sure that she had taken the cuttings from Paul Himalayan Musk, which can grow to enoumous height and size. By spring 2008, the 2 inch cuttings had grown 3 feet tall and producing little buds. On the 16th of May 2008, the first bloom opened up and it was the same day we attended the funeral of aunt Mary's husband.

I cut the first bloom and brought it to the graveyard along with the florist wreath which represented our family in mourning to her loss. It was a cold drizzling windy grey spring day to bury a great man but it was a day worth remembering.

Dressed in all black, her silver grey hair made her skin looked pale and transparent like a wax. She looked peaceful but drained of emotions and I could read every single lines on her face as we hugged and whispered words of comfort. When I handed her the single bloom from the 2 inches rose cuttings she had entrusted into my care, her face suddenly lighted up with a smile of of awe. She took the rose from my hand and brought the bloom to her nose. Her eyes closed shut as she inhaled the fragrance. When she opened her eyes, she was back to her own jolly self, with a twinkle in her eyes, she said, "we must go to the nursery soon and get Little White Pet to plant on the grave". So much a rose can do to a person.

Today, she agreed that she probably had taken a cutting from a runner or suckering rootstock instead of the real mother plant. We did went to the nursery and bought the real Paul Himalayan Musk for my garden and Little White Pet for her husband's grave. We are still not sure what kind of root stock she had the 2 inches cuttings taken from, but the blooms are very similar Innermis Morletti.

The guessing game continues because there are also similarities to another damask rose cutting she had given me long time ago taken from Cyprus.


The fun of collecting old roses continues....

Say NO to plastic bags

Sometimes I suffer from what is known here as "fernweh". Directly translated into english that would mean "missing the faraway" or "a yearning for faraway places". I have always enjoyed learning about other cultures, traditions and history of places around the world. I've been to India several times and it is a fascinating land with all its colourful traditions and diversities. Its a big country to explore in just a few weeks, so my trip there was always like enjoying a slice of pizza with spicy curry flavour. One bite at a time. Some days I feel like taking another piece of my pizza over India because there are still half of India which I would like to experience, but these days, circumstances plays an important influence over my last minute decisions "where to go for holidays?"

To dull my "fernweh" towards India, I followed Mukund in India
I always had a good laugh reading the things he wrote about himself, his country India and he kind of refresh my memories over my short visits to his country.

From his blog, I learned about Small Footprint, a blog about environmental and recently Small Footprint started a Green Challenge Change The World Wednesdays
My gardening friends should check out some tips from Small Footprint regarding slug, snails and deers that always munch out the garden.

Small Footprint's challenge last Wednesday was about plastic bags which shoppers always take for granted during shopping trips and it is becoming an environmental issue how these plastic shopping bags are being disposed later.

I am taking Small Footprint's challenge and help spread the word even further.

For a long time, the Swiss are used to carrying around foldable shopping bags in their bags, or there are always several folded neatly in their car. Of course there are still some shops that will automatically award shoppers with their plastic bags that are prettily designed with their labels printed on it and this of course is understandable as they need to market their brand name using "you" as a walking billboard.

Lately, there are some changes in the trend towards paperbags and biodegradable plastics. This is of course much better than non biodegradable plastics but generally most shops will ask the shoppers if they would like a bag for their newly purchased stuffs. This is where the shoppers are given a choice to say yes or no. If you have your own foldable shopping bags in your bag, then you can simply say, no thank you. If you say yes, some establishments charge an additional 30 Swiss rappen (about 0.30 USD)for the plastic bag.

If having to pay for a plastic bag to bring home your shopping goods is not enough to remind you about the cost of producing these plastics bags, wait till you are ready to dispose your garbage which includes the one you just paid for 30 swiss rappen with a compulsory disposable garbage bags issued by the local council. Nothing is free here. It even cost money to dispose rubbish, but that certainly helped me think twice before buying anything because it takes a lot more effort and costs to discard unwanted household products for garbage collection before the final dumping.

I happen to live in a district with a council that is in full gear about environmental friendly and awareness by supporting the public with excellent recycling and waste sorting facilities. It is actually a good practice when the garbage management begin from individual's home. Their effort successfully eliminated the ugly roadside rubbish pilling up. There are permanent bins in every housing area for disposing glass, recyclable plastic bottles and aluminium cans. Every third Saturday of the month, my neighbourhood packed their vehicles with their unwanted recycleable things and drive up to the compound of the council garbage sorting area and we deposit our big pieces of recyclable waste such as old mattresses, hardwares such as aluminium, steel, old batteries, etc into separate containers for the undertakers to take them to the specific recycling centre. Again, disposing all these old materials cost a few francs, but that helped increase the efficiency of waste management in a responsible way.

Every Friday, when the council collect the garbage around the housings, they will also collect big pieces of recycleable refuse but only when those items are marked with a special stickers which can be bought from the council.

The good thing about going shopping with my own reusable shopping bag is that, when its full and I can't stuff anymore things in it, then I just knew it that I had spent enough money for the day, and its time to go home, empty the shopping bag, earn more money before going shopping again.

Jude the Obscure

Have you ever come across a situation, when you are in a group of people, talking and discussing about things, everyone looking very calm and relax and the people seemed comfortable being themselves with bits of laughter in between and at some moments a short silence as if pondering and musing over certain points, and then Jude the Obscure walked through the door, joined in the conversation and suddenly, you noticed that the mood amongst those present mellowed as Jude topped the conversation with his opinions. The happy tone from the earlier conversation suddenly diffused and thinned out. There is a sense of discomfort in the air and you felt it and sensed that the others are not feeling at ease since Jude's arrival.

You can see that Jude is knowledgeable like a walking encyclopedia. Talk like an encyclopedia and argue like an encyclopedia. You try to follow his thoughts closely and you found that you can't quite figure out what he's trying to say or prove.

That's the situation I was in today. As I watched one by one of the men and the ladies excused themselves and left, I found myself not paying much attention anymore to the discussion but my head was also busy trying to find reasons so I can leave too. How do you get out of such a situation without appearing rude or dismissive?

...and the phone beeped ever so gently, but to me at that point it sounded as if its the bell from the church tower on Sunday morning. Bong! I jumped out of my seat, excused myself and thank God for creating mobile phones!!

So I got home later in the evening, but my mind is still preoccupied by Jude's behaviour and how people reacted to his presence. I grabbed my camera and headed towards the garden and took some photos of the Austin's rose Jude the Obscure. These names are not coincidence. I have the tendency to buy plants and roses with names of people that circle around my life. As far as I remember Jude the person, used to be likeable, very humble and pleasant to talk with. I have no idea what happened to Jude and why suddenly people are avoiding him. Dare I tell him what I think? No. I dare not. The truth is always very hurtful. Besides, I've learnt to keep my advice to myself unless someone asked for it. Even then I am very careful about giving advice.

So, here's to Jude. Maybe one day he'll find this blog and read this post. Maybe not. How many guys really google for roses to read on the blog? The evening light had brought a bit of bluish tone to the soft yellow of these blooms.

This rose is very fragrant, one of the best fragrant roses from David Austin, but this rose is not really that suitable for my rainy weather garden. For several years, the blooms balled very badly. I had moved it several times trying to find the right spot. There are less rain this year since spring begun, with the month of May being the hottest and driest ever recorded in years. The first flush from Jude right now look so much better. Maybe this is the most suitable area for it under the canopy of the taller trees which filter half of the rain drops and the sudden drying sunshine after the rain.
Jude is seen here invading the space of Pegasus, also a D.A english rose.


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The stinking socks in the sharp suit

How many of us are concerned about body odour?

This is a trivial matter for some, but body odour can be a turn off for some people especially during summer months when we sweat a lot and stuck in an office with little air circulation, or cramped in a tram or train during rush hours. It is a very tricky situation to inform someone that they have a strong body odour. In my office, everyone had an understanding and agreement that every now and then, someone shall send out general circulars to remind everybody that summer months is here, so please take extra effort to put on at least a deodorant first thing in the morning before hitting the door and head to work.

Can you imagine, there you are applying for a tender or contract and the discussion is distracted by strong unpleasant odour and the discussion had to be cut short because the interviewer is about to faint from lack of oxygen.

I recently had this close discussion with a candidate, and his body odour is so potent that it almost knock me off unconcious. You may think I am exaggerating but I am not. It was very difficult to stay focus during the discussion because I can't breathe. This person certainly gave a whole new meaning to the saying "took my breathe away" Of course he doesn't notice I'm turning blue because I ran off and jumped out of the window before I could even spell out the word d-e-o s-t-i-c-k!

On all fairness, I managed to cut the discussion short and made a new arrangement for further discussion on a different date and really hope this good looking guy comes back for the meeting, care enough to take a shower in the morning, change his socks and apply something under his armpit.

There are people who get very nervous during interview that they sweat in sprays. I fully understand what nervous is all about, and I also understand the hectic of running about trying to catch a plane and then running after the taxi and all those rushing about are stressful and such situations exerbate the sweat glands even more but how much is the cost of a deo stick?

It also make no sense looking all sharp in a suit and knotted nicely on the neck but lost a job opportunity due to unchanged socks?

Alchemist

This is one rose whose name is spelt in so many different ways in so many publication and reference book; Alchemist, Alchymist, Alchymiste, alchemyst, Alchemyste, alchimiste and probably a few more I had missed out. As fascinating as the multi-tone colours that appears on the blooms, I am short of words to describe its psychedelic dizzying beauty.

This is one of my favourite climbing rose, not because of its lanky, tall and stiff growth but because the flowers are so special.

I could stare at it for hours and not get tired of taking hundreds of photo of it as if I don't want to miss a second while the blooms are still around.

This is a once blooming rose with a good fragrance. It can grow up to 4 meters tall support and excellent for specimens on pillars or arch tunnel. I tried to use it in infront of the evergreen hedge but the leaves told me that they need a good air circulation or otherwise black spotty begin as early as early summer.