War of the Roses

On Sunday, before I started planting my 72 packs of annuals, I had one other task to accomplish: to tame a wild rose bush.

I mentioned in my other post that the flowerbed on the one side of the house hardly has anything in it but weeds. However, that's not completely true. There are two rose bushes close by the air conditioning unit, given to us as a gift a few years ago by my mother. While the one seems to be keeping to a relatively bush-like shape, the other seems to be more of the climbing variety, and it has definitely started getting out of control in the past year. But because I'm such a lazy gardener, I didn't do anything about it until this year.

On Saturday, when I bought my flowers at Lowe's, I also picked up a ladder trellis for the rose bush. The ends of the trellis are only about 2 1/2 inches long, so I wasn't sure how it was supposed to be secured into the ground (since I wasn't planning to attach it to the siding). I found one of the store managers and asked him for advice, and he came up with the idea of getting a couple of iron rebar rods, sinking them into the ground, and then attaching the trellis to them with hose clamps. I was going to go with this plan until another employee happened by and suggested something smaller that would be likely to work even better. So instead I got some stainless steel rods (much like wooden dowel rods) and planned to fasten the trellis to them with cable ties (aka zip ties). And, to secure the rose bush to the trellis, I found a roll of velcro-backed plant ties, which could be cut to size and secured tightly using the velcro.

So on Sunday morning, dressed in my long-sleeved shirt, capri pants, and gloves, I confronted the untamed rose bush. First came the easy part -getting the trellis in place. The stainless steel rods worked well - I was able to push them into the ground about 8 inches, and then I attached the trellis to them with the zip ties.

Then came the hard part - wrangling the thorny branches of the rose bush up against the trellis and securing them with the velcro plant ties. It wasn't quite a war, as the post title implies, but it was at least a skirmish. Those thorns were trying their best to get through my gloves and my shirt sleeves! However, in this battle of woman versus nature, woman prevailed, and eventually I got the rose bush sufficiently secured to the trellis, as you can see below. And I'm happy to say that everything is still in place as of Monday - even after a very breezy Sunday afternoon.


Here's a picture of how the trellis is fastened to the steel rods.