The Rose Garden
March 10, 2021
The Rose Garden
March 10, 2021
My grandmother lived with us when I was growing up. Her room next to mine in the back of the house looked over the backyard. One little window in that small room jammed packed with the memories of her life. But the view from that small window…
My grandmother’s crowning glory was her rose garden. Our entire suburban backyard was divided into neat rectangular rose beds, Not flower beds, the perimeter of the yard had those spilling with daisies and mums, only tea roses lived in these formal brick lined spaces.
Our brick patio was lined with the first bed which held favorites such as Mr. Lincoln, the Eiffel Tower, and Peace Rose. Mr. Lincoln is bright red, Eiffel Tower is light pink, and a Peace Rose is a beautiful graduated lemon yellow to pale yellow. Even now, fifty years later, I can see those rose beds in my mind and smell the fragrance of the individual flowers along with the heady smell of their combined scents. There were five beds with twenty roses in each, one hundred rose bushes.
Each year, Jackson and Perkin’s named a rose of the year. There was much discussion about that rose in our kitchen. Often the bare rooted canes would arrive in plastic packaging in the early spring to be carefully added to the beds. Those beds, a riot of color and smell, were a hot bed of bees buzzing in the flowers as the sun shone.
Those beds looked just like the beds in the botanic gardens we visited regularly, fancy brick borders, carefully amended soil, those metal brackets with the name carefully printed with permanent marker. My grandmother would be out there many times during the day, her tools in her apron pockets or in a basket nearby, a small well-used trowel, her carefully maintained pruners, her sweet little shears for cutting the roses or clipping off the dead flowers, and her gloves. She would kneel on her little foam kneeler checking each rose for aphids, those iridescent bugs no bigger than a minute. Sometimes she would get out her big metal sprayer to put some pesticide on the rose at a very specific time a day. They were watered just so and fertilized at intervals that I’m sure she kept on her calendar.
No store bought flowers in my family home. Roses adorned the hall table and the occasional bud vase on a bedside or reading table. My elementary teachers would receive a carefully constructed bouquet wrapped in a damp towel and saran for the first day of school and of course, May Day. A bouquet from Florence’s garden was a treasured gift.
Roses in my life these days lack the beautiful variations and the intoxicating scent of the roses grown in those flower beds. I stop to notice store roses and nursery roses, but none match my memory of those amazing blooms.
When my parents moved from that house after I left for college, the rose garden was left behind, never duplicated in their new wilder yard. All that remains is memory, a memory of my grandmother’s devotion to her roses. A lesson in patience, a lesson in observing things closely, and the reward of tending things well.
Reflections from a Coach 
What a wonderful memory of your grandmother and her exquisite roses. It sounds like the setting of a romance novel. I love fresh flowers, but unfortunately, I was not blessed with a green thumb nor the patience of a gardener. Thank you for sharing.