Now, a few days at home in North Carolina, where the pollen is so intense that I seem to be looking through a golden veil.  Everyone is mainlining Claritin. The wild wisteria ramples through the pines and white dogwoods peer out from the edges of the woods.  With temperatures in the 90’s we’ve gone directly from winter to summer. Much madness abounds because Duke’s basketball team is rocking and rolling.

I have designed a post for pillar roses and just found my favorite Edens to make the climb.  Also known as Pierre de Ronsard, Eden is a pink beauty with a peony-type cupped bloom.  I have many of them in my garden at Bramasole.  I hope you can almost catch the fragrance from this picture:

They climb and bloom to beat the band all summer!  Here’s a picture of my pillar rose post, soon to be dripping with flowers:

It’s simply a treated 4 X 4, painted white and capped with a little pyramid of copper.  The four arms I found at Home Depot are actually brackets for hanging baskets.  When I looked for rose posts in metal, they were very expensive.  Mine cost less than forty dollars and I like them better.  We are going to set them in concrete this afternoon.  Oh, and check that Carolina Blue sky.

My other project on this break from the action is planting apple trees.  Mary, our gardener, has made wire surrounds to protect them from the deer who love to munch apple blossoms.  Before I left, we planted two crabapples, two peaches, three pears, a white crape myrtle, and two dogwoods.  She showed me how to plant them with a big dose of compost tea.  In my book tour absence, my heritage apples arrived from Century Farm Orchards in Altamahaw NC.  www.centuryfarmorchards.com

David Vernon there helped me select good pollinating varieties resistant to cedar apple rust in our area: Blacktwig, Enterprise, McIntosh, Roxbury Russet, Virginia Beauty, Gravenstein, Grimes Golden, Buckingham, Virginia Winesap, Mollies Delicious.  This is a start toward a heritage orchard in a former cornfield.  To Ed’s question, “What are we going to do with all those apples?” I don’t yet have an answer but I’ll think of something.

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