Vines and roses

Planting a palette of color and fragrance.

By June Lands | Photographer Ed Hall

Gigi Pellitier’s zero lot-line property once was covered with turf grass. Now there’s only a tiny necklace of St. Augustine grass – a frame for a striking canvas of fragrance and romantic pinks and lavenders and passionate purples and reds.

Her one concession to orange in the Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, garden is a Granada rose with a hint of orange that fades into pink then into a yellow center. There are yellows, too, in roses, coreopsis and lantana.

“Yellows look nice with the purples, especially the golden yellows.” She shakes her head, “but not the orange.”

A curve of blue-flowering agapanthus leads to a sign – Welcome to Gigi’s Garden – an invitation to come on in, smell the roses and just dilly-dally for a while. A narrow path leads to a bench surrounded by pots overflowing with geraniums. Dainty claret-red Madame Julia Correvon clematis dances in the breeze to the musical water from a fountain.

Ivy pokes in and out among blue-black salvia, indigo spires, red pentas and Double Delight roses that bedazzle the nose and eye.

“I wanted to create a feeling of restfulness and enjoyment,” Gigi says.

A Don Juan climbing rose, hanging heavy with dark red blooms, overlooks a bed of great clumps of Mexican bush sage and sprays of pineapple sage punctuated by royal-blue pots of lavender and a blueberry bush that’s loaded in season with ripe berries to reward a passer-by. Bright yellow coreopsis peeps out near purple verbena. Roses pop up everywhere.

“People like roses. They like to look at them and sniff them. But it’s kind’a fun, too, having plants that come up every year,” Gigi says.

Her artful mix of roses and perennials is structured by rocks and a winding pathway from the front to the back of the house. Shiny fronds of holly fern lend coolness. More roses tumble over arbors and lead to dill and parsley, basil and sage.

Roses aren’t the only things that tumble. So does Zoe, a shih tzu that is always near while Gigi gardens, courtesy of five stakes conveniently placed along the pathway to safely tether the fluffy pooch.

A fountain gurgles in a small courtyard, another bench beckons close by. Confederate jasmine delights the air, when its sweet-scented flowers bloom in profusion each spring. And large purple flowers of Clematis jackmanii twist and turn on a trellis leading to the grand finale.

“This part of the garden,” says Gigi, introducing the back garden, “is what I call a riot of color.”

Beneath two river birch trees, with their telltale peeling bark, and a crape myrtle, the earth sends forth color – well, every color except orange. From the back of the rose-covered house right down to the lake, sunflowers, butterfly weed and a hedge of blue plumbago sparkle in the sunshine.

Butterflies flit and flirt around thryallis with its delicate sunny yellow flowers on trailing branches shifting in the breeze. A stand of bamboo cozies up to a weathered bench. All cast a spell of color and scent and the sound of a dawn-to-dark bird musicale.

Tea roses and floribundas burst with blooms and a collage of fragrance. There’s a russet-colored floribunda called Hot Cocoa that is velvet to the touch. Another floribunda, Angel Face, displays silvery-lavender blooms. A climber rose called Fourth of July proudly shows its stripes, red and white. And two old-fashioned rose bushes with double-handful clusters of pink nod and bow in a southerly breeze.

“When you come to Florida,” says Gigi, “you think you cannot grow roses, but it’s a great misconception. We have the most fabulous growers of roses here. You constantly have to replenish the soil – the sand has to come out. Most any kind of compost will work.”

Gigi uses manure, oak leaves and mulch. She does not spray her flowers with chemical products even though some roses do get insects and black spot, the scourge of a rose grower. Instead she uses a spray of plain water or soapy water.

“You don’t want to be spraying chemicals and ingesting them and smelling them,” Gigi says. Her only exception is a little Funginex on a particular rose she’s grooming for competition in a rose show.

“Besides, we like having little critters around. And, too, we’re birders.”

A red-bellied woodpecker enjoyed the ambience so much he homesteaded one of the bird houses two years ago. He’s out and about during the day but returns home each evening.

Gigi, a retired administrative assistant, says her passion for roses probably began many years ago when she and husband Richard lived in New Jersey. Their house sat on a 21⁄2-acre, badly neglected, formal garden. She did the planning and planting and he helped with the heavy work, including laying paths and installing trellises.

She nurtured it back to its earlier elegance – then moved away, leaving it with a young couple who bought the house.

A rosarian for more than seven years, Gigi is training to become a consulting rosarian, which requires technically focused classes and testing, followed by continuing education.

Gigi is a member of the American Rose Society and a board member of the Jacksonville Rose Society.

“One of the good things about being a member of the Rose Society is that you learn what grows well in Florida,” she says. “The American Rose Society gives you the ratings of all commercially grown roses. If a rose has a low rating, it will not do well in Florida.”

She is also a member of the Ribault Garden Club in Jacksonville and the Ponte Vedra Garden Club in Ponte Vedra Beach and gives talks on roses.

Gigi’s also found a way to bring her love of garden colors indoors – two years ago she began painting with acrylics – working from photographs she’s taken of Monet’s garden and of her own flowers – and it’s almost as though she has brought her garden inside and hung it on the walls.

Read Gigi Pellitier’s list of her favorite vines and roses and her nine rose-growing tips in the September issue of Water’s Edge, on newsstands now.