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A Rose is A Rose, Isn't It?
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.
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.
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They're fun to write about.
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It's true, not everyone likes them, but I'm happy to indulge in them myself.
Yeah, the church has the formal rose garden that I help tend, and folks like those very much. There are a few wild roses along one side of the parking lot, that grew, at one point to being eight feet tall. They were amazing. But someone tried to dig them out last summer, and they're back again. *laughs*
Oooo!! The striped moss rose! Beautiful.
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I've been holding out against roses forever but after I put three new ones in this year I was forced to admit that I do indeed love them.
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I'm glad you've found them lovely! They can be a pain to take care of, but they can also reward quite well.
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We had some old rose varieties around the house in North Carolina. Unfortunately, the deer liked them every bit as much as we did. Every time they would grow out of their protective cages, the deer would carefully trim them. The roses weren't able to cope with that on a long term basis.
Perhaps we can try again, now that the dogs are around to protect them. If they can survive the dogs, that is...
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Yeah, the deer don't make it quite this far East, but in Boulder I'm sure we'd have more problems.
I'm just about ready to get everything on the machine, so I should have pictures eventually!
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I was never much of a rose person, but maybe that's just because I never had old roses like you. :)
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I'm glad you've liked!