Another one from the messy Rose House. No matter that she has to hang out in the shabby part of town, this lady is all dressed up and put together in a dramatic party dress.
Addendum: Nikkipolani in a comment below suggests that this rose resembles Rose de Rescht, and the pictures of that rose that I found online surely confirm her hunch. I didn’t get close enough to know if my pink lady also has the old-fashioned fragrance she mentions.
It’s not surprising that people have written poems about roses. Bonnie Prince Charlie made a five-petaled rose the symbol of Scotland, and Hugh MacDiarmid wrote this poem in the 20th Century. He refers in the first line to a poem by Yeats, in which the opening line mentions a “rose of all the world.”
* * * * *
By Hugh MacDiarmid
That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.
The image is still popular among Scottish nationalists, and as a symbol it’s available as jewelry. U.K. Gardeners who talk about the rose say, “The Jacobite rose dates back to the 16th century, and is the double form of the White Rose of York, Rosa x alba which, in turn, is descended partly from the dog rose, R. canina. It has the same vigour and resistance to disease of truly wild roses, but the blooms have a more cultivated appearance, fragrant and creamy white with charmingly muddled centres.”
I don’t claim that this rose from my neighborhood is the same, but it looks very like the ones pictured online, and it feels to me able, without the help of any patriotic fervor whatsoever, to break a heart.
The job I was committed to doing in the church garden was deadheading roses. It took longer than I expected because in the years since I bowed out of regular gardening there, many more floribunda roses have been planted, and most of those needed a thorough trimming right about now.
The first day I put off driving over there until midday, and in spite of my sun hat I got hot and tired halfway through. So later in the week I started earlier in the morning and enjoyed my work very much. Some of the rose bushes are my old friends, and some other plants are, too.
Like this Phormium o
r New Zealand Flax. I didn’t plant these, but on my watch, maybe five years ago, the plant in one pot died. I combed the nurseries in vain to find a replacement, and then I had a brilliant idea. Since these perennials grow constantly larger, I could “thin” and divide the two healthy plants and use what I cut off to start a new one in the third container.
It was a big project, but I completed it in a few hours one day. I spread a tarp on the concrete nearby, and after watering the pots thoroughly I managed to turn them on their sides without breaking them, and get the plants, dirt and roots dumped out. Then I cut and reassembled my plants and set them back in new planting mix. I must not have had my camera that day because the only pictures of the event are in my mind.
Now don’t they still look good? New Zealand Flax (not related to the Linum usitatissimum that we would call the real thing) doesn’t need much water, and in order to stay attractive it only wants old dry leaves pulled out or trimmed off from time to time. When I passed by these plants I noticed that this trimming hadn’t been done recently so I used my rose pruners and took care of them before I took their picture.
At home, where my tasks are more vast, I have run into problems. I put off adding horizontal support lines for the sweet peas until it would have been near impossible to get behind them to do it — so they grew about twice as high as the trellising, and bravely reached for the sky, holding on with their delicate tendrils — to what? Only to each other. And then, still clinging together, they fell.
At this point the only rescue that could be accomplished was very crude and unpretty, but it should make it possible for me to get a few more bouquets of the flowers that are now on very short stems indeed, because of the heat.
For my birthday a while back a friend took me to the Baker Creek Seed store near here, which is in an old bank building that they now call The Seed Bank. She wanted to buy me some seeds, but as it was a surprise I wasn’t at all prepared. What to get? I ended up with hollyhocks to plant next fall, and hyssop and fennel that I planted this spring, but I don’t remember what day. That’s flaky to begin with.
None of the seed packets from Baker Creek have much information on
them of the sort I’m used to. They don’t tell you how many days to maturity, or how deep to plant the seeds, or how many days they might take to sprout. Maybe they have that info online? If so, that’s too new-fangled for me; I don’t have a smart phone that I consult when I’m in the rows.
So I just watched my seed beds and kept them moist and saw that day after day nothing
was coming up, except weeds and volunteer nasturtiums. One morning I decided it was time to face the failure and start in on the weeds – but wait! Those tiny two-pronged spikes I see when I put my face down by the dirt…. they just might be the beginnings of feathery fennel leaves! So I will wait a few more days. But the hyssop – I don’t think so.
We put cages around our tomato plants, and I made labels to tape on the wire. Only about half as many plants as last year.
One successful flower in the garden is this nice California Poppy in pink and yellow. I planted it last year from a mixed six-pack of seedlings, and it came back!
That’s my overview of the week’s Plant Love.
The ever changing contents of my CSA box have encouraged me to try out some vegetables that are less familiar to me. This week I made a big stir-fry using mostly some of the items that had arrived in the front-porch delivery. I had to fry them in three batches to avoid overcrowding and the soup that can result from that. Beet greens, beech mushrooms, spring onions, celery, and bok choy went into my 12″ cast-iron skillet and a tasty mélange was dished up out of it a few minutes later.
The beech mushrooms are darling, something I’d never have invested in otherwise, and perfect for soups and stir-fries. They came out pink after nestling up to the beet greens.
I don’t think I’d ever used spring onions before. I thought they were the same thing as scallions or green onions, and maybe they are, but after the bulbs have grown fatter. This page: “How to Tell the Difference” explains and pictures the characteristics of spring onions and two other allium cousins, including shallots, which also have come in my box three times now. I have roasted them with olive oil and new or fingerling potatoes and they are sooo wonderful. In the past I didn’t appreciate their specialness enough to bother with peeling them.
I did the creamy and sweet potato-and-shallot roast the same night I made the stir-fry. Mr. Glad ate the same thing (with sausages) a second night, and there were still enough vegetables left to make a frittata for a third dinner. One of the slices of spring onion showed its concentric arcs so prettily it was begging for a photo-shoot. 
Spring is obviously the time for spring onions, and also for roses! I’ve been having rose envy along with my general garden nostalgia, because instead of increasing the rosebush population, we’ve reduced it over the last few years. I keep thinking I need to visit a rose garden this month, but today I realized that is just one more activity I can leave off the already burdensome to-do list. Instead, I will take more walks around my neighborhood that is exploding with with blooms, and stick my nose into as many as possible.
The thing about a rose garden is, you often can read a label that tells the species of rose you are admiring. But today when Mr. Glad and I shopped at two garden nurseries, we saw many roses, and I even photographed one, and did not even think of looking at its label.
We bought zinnias and lobelia, tomatoes and peppers and zucchini. Get ready for more more gardening reports coming your way!
Gladsome Lights 