Garden Centre

Saturday, June 27, 2009

A rose by any other name

My garden is not suited to roses, as I’ve said very often. We have a combination of clay soil which is like terracotta when dry and like a bog when wet, and an onshore wind which can be salty in summer and gale force in winter. So despite my love for all things rose-shaped, rose-coloured and above all, rose-scented, I content myself with my Iceberg rambler which would, I believe, survive if planted in concrete, one Old English Rose which gets as much care and attention as the whole of the rest of the border (and smells so gorgeous it’s totally worth it), a yellow rose that I was given, and two miniature red roses that arrived by accident when I ordered something else.

I don’t know what this rose is called, and for three years I forgot it existed, but this year, being a good year for the roses, it suddenly decided to remind me.

The way I acquired it was strange: I wanted to buy a garden lantern and saw exactly what I wanted at a car boot sale. As the owner wrapped it up, she held out a twig in a pot and said, “Want this?” Under the table she had quite a few of these twigs and explained that her husband had been a driver for a nursery which laid him off while he still had a van full of roses. Three months later they hadn’t been to collect them and she was giving them away with every purchase. As I say, for three years the twig remained a twig, but this year it’s rewarded my patience. I hope all its siblings were as lucky.

Labels: june garden, june roses, pink roses

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:52 AM

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