Nowadays I make a daily visit to our cold cellar in the basement. There, in a big box, are about 30 bare root roses. I did not plan it that way, but having ordered roses from Serbia making sure they would arrive no later than November 15, the end result was that they arrived in Finland in mid-December. By then the ground was frozen solid around here so deep that I would have needed some dynamite to get through. Normally, I bury my late fall arrivals into some potato patch for the winter. (...)
Feb
18
2019
My Rose Garden In the Media
Quite a number of newspapers and magazines in Finland and Sweden have written about the rose garden in Vasa. Among them are the magazines of the national rose societies in both countries. Also a few of the bigger gardening magazines in Sweden as well as one of the big life-style magazines in Finland have published articles focusing on my winter protection methods. I have also been interviewed on live TV in 2018. A TV team followed my work in the rose garden during the entire growing season in (...)
Feb
18
2019
At a Nordic Garden Fair
In April 2017 I was in Stockholm, Sweden, to talk about the way I protect my roses from the coldness of Nordic winters. This was at Nordiska Trädgårdsmässan, almost as close as you can get in the Nordic countries to the Chelsea Flower Show. When I was moving towards the place where I was supposed to get up in front of my audience it was hard to move forward as people were flooding past me in the other direction towards the gates. I was very tempted to inform them at the top of my voice that in (...)
Feb
14
2019
Growing Roses Where Roses Should Not Thrive
On this site I'll publish pictures of roses from my own garden on an island in Vasa, Finland less than 300 miles south of the Polar circle. It is rather a grim environment for roses and not many of them are supposed to survive the winters up here. Yet, I have about 400 different varieties in my garden. Some visitors have commented that it feels like visiting in an English garden when roaming about among my roses. (...)