The first cracking bud.
Zephirine Drouhin opened its first flower today. :-) The very last one to give a flower, Heirloom, has started to crack a bud, so I think I'll have gotten flowers from all of my baby roses by the end of the week.
She's so tiny!
Zephirine Drouhin. My thornless climbing rose. I am so happy with her. It's a little hard to tell in this picture because Rock & Roll is also there and some of their branches are overlapping, but Zephirine is doing really well. Lots of basal shoots as well as stems going off the main ones. I need to do some more wrapping. I hope to have a tower of gorgeous smelly roses next spring!
I've been wanting to get a good shot of Zephirine's progress up the obelisk for a while. I finally wrapped up all the stray canes a couple of weeks ago. That stray red rose up near the top right is Rock & Roll, but the rest of this is all Zephirine. She's amazing. From that teeny tiny band I planted in late March, she has zoomed up the obelisk. And all those canes are wrapped AROUND the obelisk, they're not straight up, so really they're even longer. The trick to filling out a climbing rose is to try to get the canes as close to horizontal as possible. It certainly seems to be working.
Zephirine hasn't bloomed in months, but there's always new growth. I think she's just pouring all her energy into that... and I'll have one heck of a stunning display next spring.
This is what she looked like at the end of May. Tiny!
I'm just amazed. None of my other banded roses have done nearly this well yet. Of course, they're all first-years, and the cliche is year one they creep, year two they sleep, and year three they leap. I think Zephirine is already leaping.