Playboy

There's a playboy in my garden and I invited him. It's such a quiet neighborhood, we needed something a little racy going on.

What passes for racy at my stage of life is . . . 

    . . . . an orange rose.

It is a floribunda shrub rose and I just planted it. It's called 'Playboy' -- you can't even imagine all the named cultivars of roses and how creative they get. This one caught my eye not because it is named Playboy, but because of its color. 

For some reason I wanted an orange rose, but not a gaudy one. (However, orange roses are by definition gaudy, so there's that.) I really wanted something bright to break up that long green wall of vine covered fence.

That green wall is all you see from inside our living room, straight on as you look out the slider door.  Someday you will see bright orange roses, tinged with yellow, fading to peach on a tall, upright rose, not hiding the green wall but bringing your eye forward and breaking up the expanse.

Right now it's a little shrub that won't bloom for a while yet.

It is planted in a spot among the flagstones below our patio sitting area. It's a small square of flagstones, and it used to be where the former owners' hot tub was. I can't imagine looking out the living room doors and seeing a hulking hot tub right smack there, but it was gone before we bought the house.

Now it's just a little empty area, not big enough for a real garden, too small for a table and chairs, set a foot below the patio sitting area.  I have some things going along the bottom of the fence -- a brown urn, a golden fountainy grass, some blue leaved lambsears, all waiting to bulk up. 

The soil under the flagstones is compacted from the hot tub, so I had to dig out and amend quite a large area, but the soil is nice and fluffy now. Roses do really well in Santa Fe, they are everywhere and they thrive, so I know Playboy won't give me a lot of trouble (famous last words . . . about plants and men both)

Roses like the dry air here, but they do need water, and there are three emitter heads under the mulch right there. 

Let's see if this orange rose brightens up the view from the patio and from inside the way I hope it will. Or will it break my heart and leave me dangling like its namesake?