A Rose is A Rose, Isn't It?

[liralen]

I help take care of a largish rose garden. John, Jet, and I filled about five 5-gal buckets while dead-heading the bushes. There are cabbage roses, stem roses, lots of hybrid tea roses, and even miniature roses. Nearly all are modern roses, the ones that bloom for months, one or two bunches of blooms at a time, or with the stem roses, sometimes even just one or two at a time. Elite, vain, gorgeous, picky about their care, very sparing with their blooms and fragrance, they are beautiful but not my kind of rose.

At home I only have primitive/old roses. The type of roses that bloomed in Shakespeare's time. They're lavish, frivolous, prolific, vulgar in their eagerness, these roses bloom hundreds of masses of blooms all at once, weighty enough to bend all their branches and fill the air with their scent. When the house heats during the day, at night we open all the windows and turn on the house fan to blow all the hot air out of the top of the house; and we fill the house with the scent of roses. The bees love them.

They'll all wither a few weeks, and I'll probably prune whole bushes back to plain shrubs and know they won't flower again, but for now, they're a delight.