The garden rose, those most particular of living ornaments; full of pastoral colours and somehow as parochially English as a magazine fed, repeating long rifle. All good things and very, very David Austin. I hear he was quite an exceptional shot himself. Of course he was.
Except there is another side to roses, and that is my side, and my experiences in and ongoings as a gardener who until recent times didn’t really favour them. You say David Austin and I’d say, keep it mate. All yours, I insist. Unless you were paying me, in which case, I’d try my best to get along with them like I have for years.
But before I tally my troubles, a moment’s housekeeping. In my previous editorial I had mentioned this relationship with roses, and some recent Orthodox breakthrough breakthrough in my heart towards them. I had been prepared to leave the topic there but for a rose emoji to my telephone from Fr Panteleimon, which I took to mean continue. Show and tell. So I will.
Roses are awful, or they have been. To be honest they might still be but my reaction to them has escalated recently into a fruitful bond, though they truly are unknowns from the moment you plant them, and only get weirder from then on out. When you plant something regular, a forsythia for instance, it will basically do what you are expecting something of that family to do; reach upwards and bloom. On and on, azaleas gonna azalel and hazel gonna haze.
Roses though? They might do anything, unless you are expecting anything, in which case they will do nothing. Contrarian to the point of it being a first principal, they will mess with you and grow in a fashion that resembles their colourful labelling as much as a microwave meal does once it is peeled from its packaging and seduced onto your plate. You wanted bushy? You’ll get leggy. You want repeated seasonal flowering? Well you can want on and go about altering soil about its roots while you’re at it.
And that’s all at the non violent end. At that end, roses really are quite unpleasant towards gardeners; they slice, they dice, and they leave their hooks in your bare arms by the thrice. They cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be bargained with, and you cannot destroy them by giving them a good telling to. They have been my botanical nemesis personally, practically and professionally. I simply haven’t known what to do with them.
But a couple of years ago I began a new method… just simply loving them for what they are. The Orthodox approach. I also thought that that would show them roses, and it did; but it has also shown me something as well.
It started with a perilously leggy rose of unknown flower in a corner of my garden. It had been in that space since before I got there but always failed to produce flowers due to, a, it being planted right by a concreted fence post, and b, because I felt little for roses as outlined above, and so I never plucked it up and placed it somewhere else more suitable. But over winter a couple or more back, I began to ply fresh soil about it, a little more every month until the subsequent spring when it actually began to shoot decent fresh stems. I wondered and wondered, would I see it flower for the first time, and not because it jolly well ought to, but because I wanted it to for its own glory, and to see how those flowers would look; their colours, their form, the essence of the thing.
And it happened on a morning of an off day from work. In a single day of sunlight the rose unfurled a sharp flower in virgin white, each petal laced with red tips. Striking indeed, and the prettiest thing I had ever seen in my back garden, but it wasn’t done. More and more colour leaked into its petals over the long draught of an early summers day until the red tips became a saturation of deepest pink and living tone. It was perfect, like first love, or even just first fancy. There was no taking my eyes away from it, but after work the next day, when I returned to it, its colours had faded with petals loosened themselves from poise, no less magical perhaps, and now joined by two and three other fresh blooms. There was some keen essence about it and I was reminded of a master botanist who ran a local nursery and had employed me years ago called Mountain Jim. Not his real name, but how I referred to him. He was actually called Jim Mountain. He knew The Charisma of gardening and was the man who taught me how to observe flowers with not just my eyes, but also with my concentration. He showed me how to stand back frequently and far when pruning fruit trees, so as to take in their form and prune no more than required. He was the only person who had ever employed me and said,
‘John, put down your work and come watch this wisteria with me.’
He knew the charisma and it knew him in return. You could neither take it from him any more than he could offer it to you. An incredible man, at least in the mornings. At lunchtime he’d often eat pate and then complain about feeling heavy in the afternoon, even though there was sparsely anything of him. We did most of our watching in the afternoons. Sometimes he would yell in Latin down his mobile telephone to people who called him for horticultural advice but he would soon settle and remember his place amongst things.
My apologies, that was something of an aside, but this rose revelation has caused me to recall him. He wasn’t an Orthodox man but these things creep out of people so I hope he’s made it with good time to spare.
Watching and enjoying that rose simply as it was meant that my heart was going to be in the market for more roses, and wouldn’t you know what creation was soon to lay that very thing out for me; roses from an old client. Two to be precise, and I knew them well; we had sparred through seasons for the past ten years. I’d say I had scored the cleaner strikes but they had both struck in good returns. I guess we all respected each other, but now I was going to take them away and love them. Not a play that either would have expected. See how they like that.
Well they certainly did. My clients had been clearing through a side bed in their garden and asked if I could remove said roses, immediately suggesting that I take them for myself. I had a south facing section of soil which would home them nicely and so that is where they went, the more dwarfed of the pair going closest to the kitchen window. I mixed them a compost/native soil blend, took them back to basic, struck them down and pressed them in with juicy water. This would have been at about mid March this year. Getting kind of late for a broad pruning and planting but it happened when it did.
Then I started to watch and brood. Just finding myself being around them or taking their presence in the garden as an excuse to wander passed and pee on the lawn at night. Just being friendly I suppose, but I could feel Mountain Jim’s teachings coming through me. Success was just a question of the time between March and June, because roses always behave right?
No, they did better than that, and that can be a mighty long journey of reconciliation. So that’s roses for me, past and present, personally, professionally. Apologies for something of a heart to heart over this. I’ve bled a lot of my own blood over those particular pieces of creation over the years. It takes a lot out of you and I wasn’t looking to go into battle with them in the first place. It just kind of got out of control. It is good to make peace though. Let’s keep going…
Now enough!
With blessings,
John