Maya Adonyeva’s Miniature Rose Garden
Imagine a very small and oddly shaped plot of land that houses a collection of a hundred roses. That’s precisely Maya’s garden. I asked her to share the story of how she created her dream rose garden, the challenges she faced, and how she overcame them. Now, I pass the floor to the owner of this miniature rose garden.
“My name is Maya Adonyeva, and I want to tell you not only about my garden but specifically about my rose garden and how I came to create it. We bought an old house in the Moscow suburb of Pushkino the day before 1990.
It was a pre-war construction with coal-fired heating. There was no central sewage system, natural gas, or hot water. The three-hundred-square-meter plot was in a neglected state, with buried tin cans, broken glass, and other debris.
At that time, I knew very little about flowers, and about roses, I only knew that they were beautiful. To survive, we initially planted vegetable beds and fruit bushes. But my soul yearned for beauty. The internet didn’t exist back then, and my source of inspiration was the magazine ‘My Beautiful Garden.’ My immense gratitude goes to its creators! With its help, the entire plot gradually transformed into one enormous flower garden.
In 2002, we made the decision to build a new house on the same plot. The plot was shaped like the letter ‘G,’ with a small size and an odd configuration, making it challenging to fit another house into it.
In a single spring, I had to dig up everything and transplant all the plants anew. The construction of the house took seven years, but throughout that time, the yard remained perfectly tidy, and flowers continued to bloom, although on half the territory compared to before. It was then that I realized I didn’t want to turn the small plot into a jungle. A free-style garden requires ‘freedom,’ meaning space that I didn’t have.
And then, another major transformation took place. We decided to restore the old house. During Construction No. 2, I gave away most of my flowers to neighbors in good hands. My garden resembled a war zone.
In 2014, once again starting from scratch, I decided to meticulously plan the concept of my tiny plot. Minus the area occupied by buildings, a gazebo, pathways, and foundations, I had approximately one and a half hundred square meters left, divided in half by the new house. Behind the house, near the gazebo, we decided to leave an open space. It’s the ‘backyard’ for barbecues and relaxation. Here, there are minimal plantings, and the plot appears spacious.
The front part of the garden is meant for pleasure and enjoyment. The land between the two houses measures nine meters in width and seven meters in length.
The style is very concise: a rose garden and a lawn. For all thirty years that I’ve lived in my house, I have cherished roses with tenderness and care, gradually replacing other plants in the garden. I can no longer imagine my life without roses!
I have learned to understand them, feel them, and care for them. In the early years, like many others, I bought simply ‘red and pink’ roses without knowing their names, breeders, or classifications. They were mainly hybrid tea roses from local nurseries.
However, they had two downsides: insufficient blooming and poor winter hardiness. And every centimeter is precious to me. I started studying varieties, reading specialized literature, and came to the conclusion that flor
