Stan Stachak says there’s going to be frost tonight. I do have a few perennials coming up, and I’m not planning to go out and cover them all, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give my rose over to the last frost.
I went out this evening before sunset and pruned the rose back just a little before wrapping it in an old pillowcase and weighting the pillowcase down with some terra-cotta pots. Must remember to remove the pillowcase in the morning before I leave for work.
Hopefully this saves my rose from losing any precious growth. Poor thing looks like crap, but I’m not giving up on it.
(I did feel a little absurd, protecting a rose in the middle of a patch of dirt and weeds. Maybe I *should* move the rose elsewhere, so Aaron and I can plant grass over that entire stretch.)
As for my other perennials… the tiger lilies survived cold snaps earlier in the season, and they’re still just big bushy leaves with no blooms, so I’m not concerned about them. Something’s coming up that I planted by my Morning Glories last year (hell if I can remember what it is), but I don’t really have an emotional investment in it, since it didn’t do much last year. My coreopsis has been heaving during the winter a bit, and is just now starting to grow new leaves, so I’m a little worried about it, but I think it should be fine.
Not a peep from the lavender that was growing next to the coreopsis. This was supposed to be the year it bloomed. I wish I would have known it might not have survived the winter; I had seeds I could have started. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll just let the coreopsis have the mailbox and replant lavender elsewhere.