Category Archives: roses

golden

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We returned from Islay to find Teasing Georgia looking fabulous – her golden flowers, despite her dodgy name, suit the mood of the moment perfectly. We watched the Olympics every evening on Islay, jumping up and down and screaming at the television, before heading outside for a celebratory dram and an appropriately golden sunset.

Although rather ashamed to admit it, I have to say that I really felt as though I’d had enough of the Olympics the moment the torch arrived. Every project or piece of homework at the girls’ schools seemed to be about the games, every time I turned on the television or the radio someone or other was banging on about it (though oddly enough I loved Claire Baldwin’s 30-part (!) radio series about sport in Britain). In fact I was feeling very pleased that we’d timed our summer holiday so perfectly: off on day one and back near the end.

But that was before the brilliantly bonkers opening ceremony, which we watched en route in Glasgow. From that moment I was hooked. And as the Olympics wind down I am starting to get very excited about the Paralympics – feverishly checking ticket availability, which changes from moment to moment it seems. We probably won’t manage to get to the arena, but then if the coverage continues to be as good as it has been so far, I don’t suppose it will matter too much, and it serves me right for my earlier cynicism.

And whilst on the subject of the Paralympics, do watch The Best of Men (BBC 2 this Thursday 16th), which tells the fascinating and moving history of the Paralympics. I must admit here that I have several friends involved in this venture, so I’m not exactly impartial though I haven’t seen it yet, but those who have say it’s wonderful and not to be missed. There is a review on Front Row here.

rose petal jam: part 2

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I must start by saying that this is not a fail-safe recipe. I think there are far too many variables involved to make such a claim. So much depends upon how heavily scented your roses are, maybe even how large the petals are, and of course their colour must play a part too. And then there is the issue of what time of day you pick them and whether they have been baking in the heat of the sun or pounded by a summer downpour.

It’s probably best to use my recipe as a sort of jumping off point, and then experiment until you get a flavour and consistency that you are happy with. And because it really isn’t very practical to make a large batch, it won’t feel so very awful if it all goes wrong. Above you can see the second batch of jam made from 40g of petals, below you can see both versions, and the runny first attempt, made using 30g of petals, is in the Kilner jar.

The first batch, although delicious on a crumpet, was far more successful stirred into a rhubarb fool and later some plain yoghurt. I’d happily use the method again if I wanted a rose-scented syrup for a pudding.

Both methods are very straightforward the only time-consuming part of the process is picking or cutting off the pale section at the bottom of each petal which is boring, but worth doing as it’s bitter and will affect the flavour.

1) Rose petal jam / syrup

30g petals (white part removed), 60g jam sugar, 500ml water

I began by massaging half the sugar into the petals as I had read somewhere about the importance of bruising them in order to release  colour and oils. I left them in the pan for a couple of hours with the lid on. Then when I was ready to make the jam I added the water to the petals. One method I had consulted suggested placing petals in a measuring jug and then using the same volume of water. On reflection I should have pressed the petals down a little as I had far too much liquid. The smell was wonderful and the water quickly turned a fabulous garnet colour. I stirred in the rest of the sugar and raised the heat to a rolling boil. After half an hour I poured the liquid into the Kilner jar and once cooled I placed it in the fridge. If you feel the rose flavour is too faint, you can always boost it with a dash of rose water.

2) Improved rose petal jam

40g rose petals, 80g jam sugar, 80g water,

This time I weighed my water and then having tipped 40g of water over the petals, I decided it needed another 40g.

So – take your rose petals, white bits cut off, and massage them in half the sugar. Leave for half an hour or so – I don’t suppose it would matter if you left them overnight even – and then add the water. If you like to test your setting point with a cold plate, put that in the freezer now. Bring the water and petals to a simmer and stir in the remaining sugar, taking care that it doesn’t catch as there isn’t much liquid. Then turn up the heat and once you have a good rolling boil, set the timer for five minutes. I had a set after the first five minutes.

Inspired by a comment left by Thrifty Household, I used most of this batch in a cake.

40g of petals also produced enough jam to cover a few slices of toast as well, and would have gone further were it not for the girls who preferred to eat it from their fingers.

I shall certainly be making more of both the jam and the syrup throughout the summer. And I think I enjoyed the process almost as much as the jam itself – the whole business of stripping petals from the flowers, and then stirring them with sugar and water took me straight back to childhood potion making.

rose petal jam: part 1

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I have lost all sense of the seasons, only the roses tell me that it’s summer not spring.

Time then, to make rose petal jam, something I’ve been meaning to try for several years.

Having spent the best part of a rainy morning googling recipes, I realised that almost without exception the ones I found contradicted one another on every aspect of the process: always pick flower heads first thing in the morning! Only ever pick at the end of a hot sunny day (Ha! Fat chance – though today is looking promising), bruise in sugar, steep in water, boil for no longer than four minutes, boil for an hour and so on…
In the end I decided on a pick-and-mix approach with the recipes, taking the instructions I liked and adding my own, gleaned from my experiences making various types of jam, jellies and marmalade. I picked a couple of handfuls of flower heads (early morning, in a light drizzle, no proper sun for a week), which produced about 30g of petals.

And this in turn produced about three or four tablespoons of very runny jam. The recipe I stayed closest to insisted that my brew would reach setting point within four minutes. I watched, waited, tested but it was clear that it would take hours to get to setting point, so after thirty minutes I gave up and glooped my potion into a jar. On the upside the smell in the kitchen was amazing.

Today, the rose petal syrup has set slightly – I think a night in the fridge helped – and it looked distinctly jammy and tasted rather delicious on a crumpet. I’d give my effort a 6 out of 10, but I can see where the process could be improved.

I’ll make a fresh batch later this week and it will be interesting to see if the sunshine we’ve been promised improves the flavour at all.

I’ll post my recipe once it’s been tweaked and tested.

early bird

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I’m not naturally an early riser. I’m more of a night owl, still awake at 2am with my head stuck in a book. But during the summer months, when it is properly hot and the terrace outside the kitchen is warm under foot at 7am, I am happy to leap out of bed at the weekend far earlier than I might do on a week day.

Apart from the cat and the dog, I have the kitchen to myself and I can potter in the garden with a cup of tea in hand undisturbed.

I had planned to pick some roses, but they looked so pretty peeping through the bronze fennel and the nepeta that grows around them, I found I was only prepared to pick the blowsiest flowers, the ones that are close to going over, and of course the minute I did most of the petals fell off.

Fortunately some of them made it and a bleary-eyed child has just wandered into the kitchen wanting to know the source of the lovely smell.

Sorry if some of these shots are a little dark – to get really good photographs of a garden you need to get up an awful lot earlier than my 6.50 start. More like 5am. Then the light is perfect and you don’t end up with heavy contrast or bleached-out flatness.

 

she’s back!

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The roses have begun and Gertrude is out. I’ve lost count of how many buds there are, but it’s looking very promising. William Lobb and Veilchenblau, shouldn’t be far behind. And by the end of next month, if we get some sun, Ferdinand Pichard will be doing his stripy thing. It is about this time every year that I think, Tulips! Pah! Roses are best.

That’s until next spring when the tulip fever will take hold once more. But right now
it’s roses, and I am determined to get some more. It’s a shame these images aren’t scratch and sniff – she smells divine!

gardening in january part I

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I always find it hard to connect with the garden at this time of year. Exciting catalogues keep plopping onto the doormat, but it’s difficult to remember how the garden looked at the height of summer. The sight of the bare earth, the hideous temporary fix for the path, and the hazel tree that still, to my mind, needs to go, convinces me that it’s a hopeless case. I’m easily persuaded that there’s no point investing more money in what is obviously a lost cause. Autumn’s hangers on, whose presence I valued in late November and December, are now looking increasingly scraggly and give the garden an abandoned air. All in all it’s not very enticing.

But there are signs of life here and there: new shoots pushing valiantly through the mud, fresh buds on the shrubs and the early flowering clematis, so I am forcing myself to draw up plans and make lists. And trawling through the photographs I took last year shows me that even if my plans are pretty minimal, the garden will do what all gardens do, even half abandoned ones: it will grow, bulk up, fill out, knit together and at times look very lovely indeed. At least that’s what it did last year, as you’ll see from the photographs below, the first of which was taken at the end of April, and the last in mid-September.

I think it’s vital to keep a photographic record of a garden’s progress. If nothing else, the  photographs will give you the impetus to get out in the worst weather to tackle boring jobs such as cutting back the Buddleja, or securing dangling vine wires, before it’s too late. It is also satisfying to see how far you’ve come and how much the garden has changed. And, possibly more important than all of that, photographs serve as a valuable reminder that gardens are in a constant state of flux – they change with the seasons, appearing fresh and newly minted one day, jungly and abundant the next, and then suddenly, or so it can seem, it’s all gone to seed and the show is over for another year.

I can’t quite bring myself to post the photograph of the garden as it is today – too grim. But I will, when I write part II of this post – some time next week, I hope. For now I am going back to my catalogues and my rather long wanted list.

late blooms

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I really need a full day in the garden. There are so many things I have to do: lots of bulbs yet to be planted; leaves to rake and bag up for leaf mould; two roses still need pruning; a path we should lay before it gets so muddy that we have to wait until next year; trellis and vine wires to fix. But at the moment it’s difficult to manage anything more than a desultory wander around the garden, sighing heavily here and there, before scurrying indoors to do other stuff (in a similarly random fashion).

This morning I thought I might at least squeeze in an hour before I started writing, but the heavens opened so I put it off for another day, though I did manage to pick a few flowers. I am amazed that this late in the year I am still able to fill a (small) vase with what could almost pass for summer colour – though the Sedum gives the game away.

Having had a few misgivings about Achillea ‘Moonshine’, I am now grateful for this flash of ochre gold in an otherwise very rust-coloured garden. I think it probably needs to be moved to a different spot, but it has proved its worth – flowering still, in late November – so it gets to stay. But all in all, there are very few flowers left now: the last of the Knautia is on the kitchen table, and although there are still Verbena flowers and lots of geraniums, the bunches are getting smaller and smaller. I think this is because my sedums, which are the mainstay of my daily cuttings, are now looking very sorry for themselves, their rust-coloured heads are like worn velvet, and their stems are wasting away. But as I poked about in the rain this morning, I spotted a couple of pearl-like buds on one of my anemones, and a few bright nasturtiums sheltering under their parasol leaves, so the garden may limp on for another week or two. I Know that my Clematis cirrhosa “Ourika valley” should start flowering towards the end of December (maybe sooner), and already the tight fat knots of next year’s Euphorbia flowers are emerging. It will be interesting to see if there is a moment when there are no flowers at all, or whether autumn’s stragglers will  hang on until the cycle has started all over again.

ferdinand’s last hurrah

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At the end of the week in which I said farewell to R. Mme Alfred Carriere, and resigned myself to five or six months without roses in the garden, I found R. Ferdinand Pichard lurking in a clump of Macleaya.  It’s rather late for it to be in flower – June to October is the normal range – but I guess it’s because we’ve had such a mild autumn and, whatever the reason for its late appearance, I was delighted to find it. I doubt that the other buds will come to much, but I’m enjoying the one that has flowered: its distinctive splashy stripes have such fine streaks at their edges one could easily be fooled into believing they had been painted on. It also smells divine. As the rose responsible for my passion for the plants it seems fitting that, of all the roses in my garden, it should be Ferdinand Pichard taking a final curtain call as winter sets in.

the first of the winter cutbacks

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No, not a political rant, but the first step towards slowly and reluctantly putting the garden to bed. Although it’s nice being able to see parts of the garden that have been hidden for the past few months, and I know that many plants not only benefit from being cut back, but actually need it, I will miss the jungly abundance of late summer and early autumn. I like to wait as long as I can before starting this process, and always leave a few dead stalks and dried flower heads to catch the frost. But with the weather set to turn, this weekend seemed like the perfect opportunity to get to grips with the largest rose, R. Mme Alfred Carriere. In fact this beautiful rose, which falls somewhere between rambler and climber according to one of my books, isn’t actually in our garden but tumbles over from next door.

After several discussions through the trellis, my neighbour and I decided that ‘brutal’ was the way to go when pruning Mme Alfred Carriere.  This seems a poor reward for such a splendid performance – she’s been in flower since April, and the flower above is now in the kitchen  - but the branches were flopping all over the place and some of the trellis is coming apart. We both felt that a strong wind would spell disaster for rose and trellis. Besides which, we hope our cruelty will pay dividends next year: treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.