Late November colors

Several plants keep their colorful leaves or berries until late autumn. The plants below have been photographed this morning. Most of them are easy and cheap to find.

Berberis koreana:

With a Molinia 'Transparent' in the foreground.

Berberis thunbergii 'Bagatell':

Berberis thunbergii 'Golden Ring':

Berberis thunbergii 'Aurea':

Berberis thunbergii 'Erecta':

Berberis x mentorensis:

Callicarpa bodinieri 'Profusion':

Attention, it only produces these beautiful berries if you plant at least two ones against each other.

Cotinus coggygria 'Royal Purple':

In the foreground a Berberis thunbergii 'Atropurpurea Nana'.

Cotoneaster 'Skogholm':

Euonymus alatus 'Compactus' and Bergenia:

Euonymus europaeus:

Geranium sanguineum 'Striatum':

Hydrangea quercifolia:

Miscanthus (unfortunately I do not know the name of this species):

Miscanthus 'Adagio - Euonymus hamiltonianus 'Indian Summer':

Miscanthus 'Gracillimus':

Molinia 'Karl Foerster':

Behind it, on the trunk of the grubbed poplar tree there is oyster mushroom growing to our great pleasure.

Rosa 'Ballerina':

Rose pages

Now as I finally don’t have to weed, there is time to browse the pages of gardening. Let us begin with roses.

Rosenmeile: The page of Christine Meile, rose gardener and photographer (as well as a dog fan). Wonderful and rich in information.

Helpmefind: Everything that is rose. They publish several photos of each plant (and eventually links to gardens where the respective rose can be found), give very precise data about their height and width, and often also about their tolerance of shade. They provide detailed information about special sorts like the completely cold hardy Canadian roses which had been developed in the last decades. This is the site I use the most about roses.

RogersRoses: The web version of that fabulous English book whose illustrations incited us ten years ago to establish our rose garden and that I have been regularly browsing ever since. The internet version has a very good search function.

EveryRose: One of the largest rose databases with an advanced search function. Its composite searches were a great help to me as a beginner.

RoseFile: Another rose database with many good images and information, and with a special page on roses for cold climate.

JustOurPictures: The most beautiful rose photos I have ever seen.

David Austin Roses: In my opinion the most beautiful roses of the world. They look as marvelous as historical roses, but in contrast to them they are remontant. They have fantastic colors, some of them smells wonderfully, and some are extremely sturdy. In my experience, however, we in Central Europe should better import his roses from more nearby regions, Germany or Austria, because they are stronger and develop better at us.

Peter Beales Roses: The other world famous British rose nursery alongside with Austin’s. They sell more than 1300 classical roses, and have a quite fantastic offer concerning wild roses and historical roses. The page has a very good advanced search function that also includes the roses’ demand of light and soil, an information otherwise hard to obtain. (Nevertheless, take with caution the periods of blooming reported by them.) Their roses curiously tolerate better the change of climate between Britain and Hungary than those of Austin.

Rosen von Schultheis: The doyen of German rose nurseries with a large offer and good quality. It sells a lot of English roses, and also a number of such specialties like the Canadian and Estonian hybrids which are surely cold hardy at us.

Cornelia

An extremely sturdy and vigorous rose. It is good that I have found just this image of it, as they usually comment on its – in fact existing – good properties, and they only occasionally say that its withered flowers stay on the shrub. You have two options: either you continuously cut them, or you try to see what is nice in them.

class: hybrid musk (Joseph Pemperton 1925)
height: 150-305 cm
width: 150-185 cm
American hardiness zone: Z5 (down to -29 ºC)
bloom: repeated

The Help Me Find regards it as shadow tolerant, and we have experienced the same. I have just read in the Help Me Find that it has to be pruned very cautiously or it does not have to be pruned at all. However, I have pruned it quite strongly in this spring. And indeed, since then I have been observing that this rose does not like something. Now I know what. I hope it will recover soon.

Ballerina

An extremely sturdy rose. In the first two years it was planted on three especially wrong places, nevertheless it bloomed nicely everywhere. It also has a nice shrub.

class: hybrid musk (Bentall 1937)
height: 90-185 cm - At us 120-150 cm.
width: 70-150 cm - At us 120-150 cm.
American hardiness zone: Z5 (down to -29 ºC)
bloom: repeated
At us it continuously blooms from the beginning of June until the first winter frosts. As soon as one bloom is over, it already begins to produce the new flowers. It tolerates half shadow.