Roses and Remaining True to your Roots
From guest blogger, Sandy Mitchell:
I’m always astounded at the riot of color my climbing roses bring to the garden faithfully each first week of June. No matter how late or early the spring blossoms begin, the garden seems to regulate itself by June, into its time-honored rhythm.
I have four red climbing roses around my double city lot in the heart of Cleveland. Two came with the property, remnants of the glorious garden that once thrived here in the 1960s. The other two have a more interesting history. Like many a novice gardener, when I first started gardening in earnest ten years ago, I was drawn to the glossy catalog photos of colorful, well-manicured hybrid roses. (You know: those roses that take more care than your children do.) I bought myself a lavender “Barbra Streisand” rose and a pale pink “Lady Diana” rose, complete with papers, pedigree, etc.
For the first two seasons, I got one, maybe two blooms for each of these specimens, while the antique climbing roses giggled merrily and bloomed vigorously. At about season three, a curious thing happened, instead of producing pale pink and lavender blossoms, my “celebrity” roses hosted a smattering of red buds. (I’ve since learned that most hybrid roses are produced by grafting onto “antique” rose bushes.)
Today, my few struggling blooms have been replaced by the cascade of color you see pictured above. Every time I look at these roses I can’t help but think that my garden is trying to tell me that it’s important to be who you are, not who people want you to be!
Sandy blogs with me at Robust Cooking as well as other b5media blogs, including Light the Torch, Green Posse, and All Holiday Café. She’s been a devoted urban, organic gardener for more than a decade, but still finds that there’s a lot her garden has to teach her.
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