So many flowers how do I choose?

Join

It was very hard for me to decide what photos to post for this weeks Green Thumb Sunday. Last weekend I was working in my garden planting annuals in hanging baskets, flower boxes and strawberry pots, but prior to getting started on my work I took a ton of photos of the garden. The garden was just full of rose, peony and clematis blooms .

Other plants were blooming as well … so how do I pick which photos to show you today? It was hard but I decided to focus on roses for this post since they were blooming in such abundance. If you want to see what my garden looked like last Saturday just take a look at the pictures in my Flickr account. I created a new folder for the start of summer and the photos in my Garden Summer 2008 folder are all the ones I took just last Saturday (146 pics!).

In this photo you can see how well my Climbing Iceberg roses are doing. I just planted this one last year! Other roses and plants that you can see are from Right to left – climbing iceberg, basket of coral colored impatiens waiting to be planted, Johnson’s blue geranium, hosta, peony Karl Rosenfield, Prince Napoleon (pink antique rose), Parade (climbing rose), William Baffin (pink hardy Canadian Explorer rose) and you just might be able to see Compte de Chambord as the last pink rose to the left. Of course you can also see phlox (not blooming) and many other plants.

Jam packed isn’t it?

En masse the garden was spectacular with all those roses blooming at once, however it was even more delightful to take a moment to view the roses up close. For example isn’t this Valencia hybrid tea rose just gorgeous?

Then there’s Dr. Huey – yes a weed rose.

The former owners of our house had one single rose, and when they moved they took it with them. Unfortunately they left some of the graft root behind and it started growing like crazy! I dug it up and moved it to an area that need a rose when I first started my garden – not knowing then that it was the graft root Dr. Huey. Since our winters don’t normally have a lot of snow this rose doesn’t always bloom well, but this year it’s blooming better than ever thanks to all the snow cover it had this winter. Oh yes and it’s about 14 feet tall!

If you like hardy roses with a bit of that wild rose look you might enjoy William Baffin. This rose produces flowers pretty much all summer long but I warn you this rose will take over your garden! It’s huge! We had to take a saw to some of it’s thick branches this year just to prune the darn thing. It’s like a tree.

I could go on and on with photos, but you get the idea. The roses were blooming and they were breath taking.

I’m going to try a new thing here and give a little linky love back to a few of out GTS participants each week.  So each week either before or after I create my own Green Thumb Sunday post I’ll select five GTS members who’ve made a recent post and highlight their posts.  I’ll select participants at random.  All you need to do is make a post each Sunday and have at least one or two lines of text in your post for the software that I’m using to find your posts to work properly – ok?

So without further ado here are some highlights from five bloggers who particpated in this weeks Green Thumb Sunday meme:

Other Green Thumb Sunday posts to check out:

Green Thumb Sunday 06/29/08 – Green Thumb Sunday 06/29/08. I took this photo at Cafe Loco in Bellows Falls, VT. Cafe Loco is located at the Harlow Farms store and they had a ton of flowers all over the place. So I got many, many more for Green Thumb Sunday’s to come.

Green Thumb Sunday: be my guest – I found this little guy on my patch of Chantenay Red Core carrots a couple of days ago. The carrot patches are jungles of insects–beetles, flies, the occasional ladybug, and this grasshopper. I looked up grasshoppers and I should have …

Green Thumb Sunday – I spent the greater part of Friday evening working in the yard planting both seeds as well as seedlings that should give me plenty of Green Thumb Sundays over the next few months. I planted a cherry tree, and apple tree, banana trees, …

Green Thumb Sunday: First carrots – First carrots. I’ve never managed to grow anything other than minute baby carrots before, so I’m quite proud of these Paris Market baubles that have grown in the Grow Dome. Join Green Thumb Sunday or check out the other participants.  You must check out these carrots – they’re round!

Green Thumb Sunday thorns amid the roses, or dandelions amid the … – My GTS is just a little dose of reality, which I am constantly getting from my garden: We have some lovely thyme as a groundcover. Then I see (and today you can see it too!) the weeds amidst the beauty. I haven’t even gotten to this end …

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information. GTS participants remember to check in at As the Garden Grows each week so that we’ll know you made a new post!