A visit to the Antique Rose Emporium on a cold, windy, rainy day...

What can I say? Terrible weather, but it was the only weekend in April I had free, so aided and abetted by a friend, off to the Antique Rose Emporium we went.

Most of the flowers were battered by the weather and I felt bad taking pictures of them. But some seemed completely resistant to the elements.

The hands-down winner, in my book, was Madame Antoine Mari:

The spring-blooming climber "Alchymist":

The China "Louis Philippe" in part-shade. This rose seems to deal better with shade than any others I've seen so far in Texas:

Huge bushes of "Monsieur Tillier":

For scale purposes, a bloom of Monsieur Tillier against my hand. I'd seen this rose the fall previously at the Austin Botanical Gardens, and then the flowers were maybe half this size (and I was still dwarfed by the giant bushes):

"Rosette Delizy," a Tea, looking a bit battered, but with colors as vivid as ever:

For my edumanication, a lesson in how to use pillar ties by the Antique Rose Emporium: simple twine, nothing fancy: