Happy Friday everyone! For today’s Flower Friday, we have a really special one for you! Literally years in the making, we have finally finished our subarctic rose & peony garden!
Rose gardens are not exactly a concept you encounter at 65 degrees north. But, perhaps around seven years ago now, we found ourselves a subarctic hardy rose and we proved that it could survive here. Even through 50 below temperatures! Over the years, we’ve added more varieties and color diversity, with continued success at overwintering this popular flower that is commonplace at lower latitudes.
As you might imagine, genetic selection for subarctic hardy roses is of paramount importance. We’ve, of course acquired a couple varieties out of local nurseries. But, to get great plant and color diversity, we’re also pulling fairly rare stock out of highly specialized growers in places like Colorado and other cold states that grow certain varieties for climates like ours.
After we had a few of these specialty roses, we decided we really needed a better home for them. We had this kind of half-baked “garden” area that we were using for these roses, also occupied by a few out of control irises. But, there was no clear direction with the garden and it was really a pain to mow around. So, we took that half baked area and turned it into what you now see today!
The focus of this garden is mostly around roses and peonies, of course. But, we’re also using it as a proving ground for other highly unique flowering perennials. We intend to fill it out further in future years, likely adding one or two new perennial flowers each season until it’s truly full.
You might also notice that there’s a bit of a rock garden concept intertwined. We selected a number of unique rocks that demonstrate the amazing geology of Alaska, with similar stones placed together to sort of tell a geologic story. We have everything from rose quartz to various types of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock that you’ll find across the wilds of Alaska.
The garden is also fully irrigated with pressure compensating emitters, making it very easy for us to conserve water and keep our perennials in tip-top shape. We’ll eventually cover the irrigation lines with wood chips, but it’s good enough to call it done now! We selected wood chips as our mulch since they’re easy to remove the inevitable weeds from and will highly discourage dandelion growth.
This was our first major landscape renovation that we’ve taken on in Alaska. We can appreciate why most Alaskan’s idea of landscaping is to do almost nothing, it’s extremely hard work! It eventually took some heavy equipment to get ‘er done, sod grown under the midnight sun can be almost impossible to remove by hand!
We’ll inevitably be producing future Flower Friday posts out of this garden. But, we wanted to demonstrate this project for you all as we’re quite happy with how things turned out! This might just be the world’s most northern rose garden!
