Most of our holiday favorite items have been added to the sight as of September 2! This includes our huge line of Grand Trumpet Amaryllises, our most popular holiday gift item. Once they arrive at your home it will take them about 4-6 more weeks to bloom, and they should be glowing with giant billowy blooms through the holiday season.

Your amaryllis will come planted in a collectible planter, and many of the gift packages include delicious fine chocolates from Lillie Belle Farms. There are currently 39 Amaryllis items listed on the Jackson & Perkins website right now, many colors and sizes to choose from. These make great living gifts that you can have shipped straight to your family, friends, or clients. Living plant gifts are great gifts because they are lasting gifts - blooming year after year. You may also want to pick up a few for yourself - to brighten up your home this holiday season.

We'd like to thank everyone who stopped by our display at the Upstate Women's Show at the Carolina First Center in Greenville, SC  this past weekend. We had a lot of fun and met lots of great people. Thanks for all of your wonderful compliments on our display - we had a few people working really hard to put all of that together.

If you didn't make it out, you missed a great expo with plenty of fun and interesting exhibits. Our
own exhibit featured a forty foot garden path lined with some of our finest roses in full bloom ending at an old-timey front porch with a couple white ricking chairs. I will follow up with a link to more photos soon.

We'll try to keep you posted on gardening events and exhibitions in the future, especially if we're going to be there.

They are beautiful. They are inexpensive. They are extremely low maintenance, and most of them will continue to come back every year, spreading and naturalizing in your garden. Flower bulbs should be one of your yearly gardening staples, a go-to problem solver.

They are so varied and adaptable - you can buy irises and lilies that will grow in standing water or perhaps a tulip, crocus, or hyacinth cultivated in dry Mediterranean climates. These plants will stand up to the toughest droughts. Bulbs can be a hardy practical way to fill dull spots in your landscape design.

Because the blooms seasons vary, you can create a bulb garden that is always full of blooms and constantly changing throughout the year. This can be difficult if you are buying your bulbs from a bin - you may want to ask your local nursery attendent for assistance, but if you are shopping for garden bulbs online, Jackson & Perkisn will always include approximate bloom times in the product descriptions.

'Beach Blanket' Groundcover Rose

Roses love water - they can be some of the thirstiest plants in your garden. The local climate and soil type can affect the moisture needs of an individual plant. You will have to come up with your own watering schedule, but the important thing to remember is regularity. An inconsistent watering schedule can be as damaging to your plant as heavy rains or drought.

Always water deeply - light waterings lead to shallow roots and weak plants. If you soak the ground the roots will grow deep and the plant will become strong an established. Water at the base - overhead watering will lead to wet leaves and a proclivity to fungus and disease. Watering at the base also ensure that the plant directly receives enough moisture.

Water well when the plant is young to ensure more resilience later on. An established rose bush with a deep root system will fair better against sudden changes in moisture levels, thriving through tough droughts and heavy storms.

Not your typical cut-rose, Floribunda roses are usually the roses that attract the most attention in the garden. They are more hardy than many other varieties, and their tendency to remain in full bloom throughout the growing season makes them a remarkable addition to any landscape design.

Though they lack the long stems and statuesque appearance of Grandifloras, their abundance of perfectly sculpted blooms makes for a spectacular dining room centerpiece or decorative bouquet. Their is nothing that will brighten a room quite like a real live cut-flower arrangement. And, because all varieties of Floribunda roses bloom throughout the season, you can mix and match for a dazzling display or colors and sweet fragrances to flood your next dinner party with praise and conversation.

*Pictured Above: Honey Perfume Floribunda Rose

Most rose varieties can be grown easily in containers, everything except the largest climbing roses. Growing roses in a container is not really any more difficult than growing other plants in containers.

• Your container must be large enough to house mature root system (usually about 15 inches tall and wide).
• Your container must have good drainage - do not use a container that doesn't have drainage holes in the  bottom
• Use high quality, nutrient rich soil. Commercial potting soil is perfect, but amending it with equal parts compost and manure will really give your rose a running start.
  
• Place your rose where it can receive enough light. Most rose varieties prefer full sunlight - think about placement beforehand to save yourself some trouble.
  

Potted plants use nutrients much more quickly than if they were planted in the ground. Use an all-purpose rose fertilizer once every other water, and/or work a rich compost into your soil mixture. You will also need to water more often with potted roses because the soil moisture will evaporate more quickly. Roses need a deep watering, but they will rot if they are perpetually moist. Stick your finger into the soil to test - if it is dry it is time to water again.

If you want to try growing roses in containers here are a couple of suggested starter varieties that will be relatively easy to grow: Happy Chappy Groundcover Rose is a very hardy, weather tolerant rose that responds well to container gardening; Wild Thing Shrub Rose is a compact shrub rose with glowing coral blooms, perfect for container gardening and landscaping.

Jackson & Perkins offers many garden structures including arbors, trellises, and arches to aid in growing you climbing roses and perennials. Climbing roses are gaining in popularity, and everyone wants to have the fairytale garden that seems to overflow with mounds of deep colorful blooms. The truth is, it's not too difficult. With the right rose, and a sturdy arbor, you can have a wall of flowers that will incite envious stares from the whole neighborhood.

Training your plants to grow on a trellis is easy with plants that naturally have a tendency to climb. Just use little pieces of string to guide them along the way. Mind your strings that they don't inhibit growth or cause damage to the plant. Once your plant is matured, it and the trellis will be inseparable, a dense wall of beauty.

Yesterday I was handed a copy of the brand new Jackson & Perkins® Fall Garden and Gifts 2009 catalog. The Pictures! There are full-page photos of the top roses on the market for 2009-2010, and they are truly impressive, especially in the close-ups.

In an earlier post, I mentioned Sedona, the J&P 2010 Rose of the Year®. Its large, beautifully sculpted salmon blooms can be seen on the cover of the new catalog.

Another lovely full-page feature, the playful rose Grandiflora Peppermint Splash, is a bright swirl of beautiful red and white petals. This brand new, speckled beauty is a J&P exclusive.

You can also see a close-up of the fun favorite 2010 Floribunda of the Year®, Rose Monkey Business! This floriferous banana yellow rose is a perfect specimen fun enough to wow the masses, but technically superb enough to impress the most seasoned rosarians.

Do you know the difference between Floribundas and Grandifloras? Grandifloras are the long-stemmed hybrid teas with the perfectly sculpted blooms, the perfect flower shop rose. Floribundas are great landscaping roses, short-stemmed shrubs with many clusters of blooms.

You can read more about each of the different rose varieties on our Understanding Rose Classifications page. You can find out about everthing from climbing roses and tree roses to ground covers and miniatures. Check it our today and brush up on your rose knowlegde!

Monkey Business Floribunda Rose is the Jackson & Perkins 2010 Floribunda of the Year! It is a fun summertime rose that is sure to brighten up any garden. These dense little 4 foot shrub roses will be over-flowing with big, banana-yellow blooms for most of the summer! The small size and showy disply make this rose perfect for patios and container gardens.

Each flower forms into a perfectly sculpted classic rose bloom, impressing even the most technically-minded veteran rosarians. But the playful bright colors and subtle sweet scent make this rose fun and accessible to gardeners of all ages and skill levels. If this isn't exactly what you're looking for you can browse all of the Jackson and Perkins Floribundas and find the perfect rose for your garden.