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.

Comments

[sophiap.livejournal.com]

I adore old-fashioned roses, and I love the way you describe them. I'm hoping the wild roses are still in bloom when I go on vacation. There are places where the bushes all but cover the dunes, and the scent of roses mixes with the scent of the sea. Oh, yeah...

[rephetibel.livejournal.com]

The old shrub roses are the kind I have too. Not everyone likes them though. I took a bouquet of different varieties to coffee hour at church once several years ago. Someone asked me what they were. When I explained, she said they weren't 'real' roses. Since some of them were striped moss roses, a rose that is centuries old, I was inclined to disagree.

[r0ck3tsci3ntist.livejournal.com]

Pictures!!!!!

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.

[tallcedars.livejournal.com]

Pictures! Smells, too, please!

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...

[nosferatu-blue.livejournal.com]

I like the sound of your roses better (the adjectives helped ^_^). They're strong enough to bloom on their own without any help, independent and in your face.

[annieroo2.livejournal.com]

WOW! That was a perfect picture in my head. How beautiful.

I was never much of a rose person, but maybe that's just because I never had old roses like you. :)