Mme. Carrière Found in Secret Spanish Garden

'I'm growing old-fashioned roses, come over and see them,' said Marianne.  That was four-and-a-half years ago when she sold me the deep pink damascene Rose de Resht now blooming madly on our front porch. We're thinking of adopting a new rose or two, so Fred and I shoulder cameras, notebooks, bug revoltant and hats for our expedition  into Lanjarón bush country.

Up the Path of the Numberless Espígas (the grass spears every dog owner is picking up and pickin g out right now), down one Aztec ruin of concrete steps and up another, we tread down sweet herbs across a field to a tawny stone cortijo set in a green madness of growing things. I had always envisaged politely trimmed plants in neat rows, but Marianne's secret garden gushes up from the earth in fountains of leaf and flower.

Back in Denmark, Marianne Dylsing was a midwife and homemaker with a spare-time partiality for roses that eventually grew into a passion. She was inspired by Danish rose-princes Valdemar Petersen and Thorben Tim.  'I visited Tim's famous gardens not far from Copenhagen and met him.  When I was leaving I told him: "Your gardens need weeding, they're a mess!" By 1996, she was working for him full time. 

 Much travelled Marianne (she has also lived in Nicaragua and Israel) came to Andalucia on the trail of yet another rose gardener, loved Lanjarón, and moved here in 2004. From a tangle of weeds and builder's rubble, and with the help of her obliging landlord, Antonio, she has created a series of bowers or garden rooms.  I take my nose on a stroll through her 'sense garden'.  Roses, lavender, mint and rosemary entwine with deep purple sage flowers and their velvety leaves, against a curtain of valerian and lemon balm. An almond tree bends gracefully in one corner, with lemon, pear and orange trees to keep it company.  In the far corner, glassy pink and white cherries weigh down their branches.

How does Marianne's rose garden grow? In the past, she has brought plants over from Denmark, but a recently established nursery garden with native cuttings looks promising. She pots bare-rooted plants in ordinary compost until she can choose a good, part-shaded site in the heavy clay soil roses love. In spring, when they start to green up, she feeds them yummy well-rotted goat manure, then deep waters every few days when they are in the ground (pots get watered every day).  Apart from 'a little chat and a morning shower', spring and summer care is largely deadheading and pest control. Fungi like rust or blackspot are removed as quickly as possible and not recycled into compost. 'Many varieties will bloom again in the autumn, with more intense scent and colour than before,' says Marianne. In winter, the rosebushes are pruned back hard.

I ask Marianne which is her favourite rose. She points to a many-petalled climber, a white rose that has just had a thought about turning pink. Mme. Alfred Carrière leans langorously over the fence in front of the cortijo like an escapee from the Chelsea Flower Show. 

Marianne has plants for sale, and can design a secret garden for you too, if you ask nicely.  Email her at l@rosa.as. When we leave, she picks me a bouquet of lavender, lemon balm, valerian and sage, and tiny rosebuds, icing-pink.  'Come back in the autumn for your rosebush,it's too hot to plant now,' she says.  I turn around to thank her, but she has disappeared into the green.

Comments

[Lori]

I just fired up my diffuser with some lavendar and other scents when I sat down to read this - talk about sense-o-blog! As always you present an image that puts me right there, and then Fred's great photos let me think the aroma is indeed coming from the screen. One more place you'll have to take me when I make it there...