My Roses Want to See You

   No where does one thing lead to another more than in the garden.  You start out pruning roses, then find yourself pulling the weeds around them and then the weeds everywhere, only to empty the wheelbarrow over the compost pile, fill it again with that good rich dirt and spread it over a waiting bed, in which you sprinkle the arugula and parsley seed you stuck in your back pocket that morning. One plant leads to another too, whether it flourishes or not, it will beget either the stubbornness to try again or a hunger for something new. This I realized today, as I counted the roses in the vegetable garden alone. There were twenty-two. How did this happen you ask? Well I’ll tell you.

    It started as five bare-root roses scrounged from the clearance section at the Park Seed garden festival. They were only a few bucks apiece. What was there to lose? Had we known the whole landscape would be all but taken over one day, we would’ve considered more carefully.  But such is the nature of garden-life: You just never know. (Consider the artichokes, for instance!) They were gaudy hybrid-tea roses with cheesy names like Miss America, Sun Fare and Always and Forever, but they were enough to prove the critics wrong. Roses are worth every bit of the trouble they cause and will go on causing trouble and being worth it long after the lazy postmodern gardeners rest under plastic flower arrangements.  

    In our quest to learn how to prune and defend against the various pests and nefarious spots and molds, we stumbled upon David Austen’s English Roses and thus began the one great love affair of my gardening life. Though the hybrid-teas are still with us, the English Rose is a breed apart. They are simply what roses ought to be. Chesterton said, “I don’t deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.”  English Roses are the poets of the garden, filling you with rapture while letting blood, wedged between the peppers and the eggplant, like learning in wartime, giving value to survival.

There is Queen of Sweden, Lady of Shalott, Munstead Wood, Generous Gardener, Molineux, Young Lycidas, Lark Ascending and more. We’ve made room for their coming in all their varied hues, scents and postures and we’d gladly scoot the tomatoes over for just one more.

     What’s the secret to rose-gardening? you ask.  Well, there is one and I’ll tell you. Horse manure.  And here again one thing leads to another, for if you give a girl a rose, she’ll need a horse to go with it.

     “I took a walk through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Believe it or not, there amid the trenches and the bomb craters and in the raw, cold weather was a whole garden of red and yellow roses in bloom.”  -from Ernie Pyle’s Here is Your War