There Were Roses

No, not the sad song about “The Troubles” in Ireland from some decades back about the Protestant and Catholic conflicts.  I *will not* start in on religion today. I am feeling fairly cheerful. On to what I want to share. Roses, the flowering kind.

I've loved them for at least 65 years.  As a small child I did not notice flowers much. We lived in Jerome, AZ where for the most part, everything was a mass of rocks! It was a mining town perched high on steep red hills. In our small yard there were a few trees that someone had nursed along to near house-high but Sunshine Hill had few flowers. Then in late 1953 we moved down to the valley and settled in Clarkdale where we rented two small houses, side by side.

The joint yards did boast a few flowers. There was a row of iris growing along the fence between them, all the traditional purple with fuzzy gold inside as I recall. Around the north-facing front steps there were some small viney plants with purple flowers. I think they were called vincas. And there was a rose bush against the screened back porch south wall on the second house which was a storage/shop/office etc. It only bloomed in the spring so since we moved in November I probably first saw those tiny flowers in the spring of 1954, sometime around my eleventh birthday. I was at once enchanted.

I’m not sure now why they came to be precious to me but they did. There were other more common and typical tea roses and floribunda in many yards but ‘my’ rose was special. I now know it is a type called a rambler which is midway between the regular shrub roses and the climbers. My research, conducted the last year or two as I sought to find a similar plant, taught the ramblers have buds and leaves in groups of seven, a unique trait.

This Clarkdale bush was clearly old, very heavy at the base and growing up near the eves of the back porch, perhaps eight or nine feet off the ground. It bloomed in profuse clusters of tiny thickly petaled roses, pale pink that shaded into and then faded to white as they aged. They were elfin or fairy flowers to me, so little, so dainty, so perfect with their thick clustered petals that made them almost little pom-poms. For twelve years or so that bush remained my special charge. I watered and trimmed and loved it.

In 1966, I left home to spend four years in Flagstaff as I went to the university. The second two years I lived in an apartment in an old house on Agassiz St. There was a similar bush in that yard, just to the left or east of the entry foyer/porch. I noted it in passing often enough but it was not ‘my’ rose. There were some others in the yard as well but I was too busy for gardening as I got two degrees in four years.

Finally that time also came to an end. I went to work for the Army at Fort Huachuca and lived in several briefly rented Sierra Vista homes in short duration and then moved to Bisbee, perhaps a fated or at least a pivotal act on my part. A year later I married my new next door neighbor. Before we left Bisbee, I had bought a couple of rose bushes-maybe at the super market since Walmart was not there yet. I remember a dog that adopted us rather trashed one in spring 1973 and I was upset.

Then very late in 1973, we moved to Colorado when I transferred to the Air Force at Peterson AFB. We bought a home in Falcon, about ten miles outside of Colorado Springs. It was then a very rural area where most lots were five acre ranchettes. We had a big garden and I planted roses, a row of six along the east-facing front of the house. They came from Jackson and Perkins and did well enough. I winterized and covered them each winter since at the edge of the prairie the cold and the blizzards could be wicked. Then things happened and we found ourselves moving to California in the late summer of 1977. The first roses to really be mine were left behind.

I worked briefly at Beale AFB near Marysville and the next year transferred down to McClellan on the north edge of Sacramento. Meanwhile we bought a house on the south outskirts of Olivehurst, almost suburb of Marysville. Again I planted roses, only two this time but the area had many. They grew well and bloomed profusely, all season long as hybrid tea roses do. One was deep red and the other a striking red and white. I loved them and often took a bud or two to a couple of special friends with whom I worked.

I was not happy in California. The seasons were all wrong—hot and dry all summer without my beloved desert thunderstorms—and then soggy foggy dismal gray on the backside of the year. I was not really happy with my work either and Jim and I both wanted to go “home” but I promised Jennifer, my daughter, we’d stay until she finished high school.  The last year I began to send out transfer applications and in the late summer of 1983, six years after we arrived, we packed up and trucked back to Arizona. Once more I had to leave my roses behind.

I worked briefly at Davis Monthan in Tucson and the next spring got back to Fort Huachuca where I finished the rest of my civil service career. There were no plantings in our rental in Tucson for we knew it would be temporary. Finally we found and bought the rustic and unique little adobe house in Whetstone which was to be our home for the next two decades. At last I could indulge my floral ambitions. There were some spindly old fashioned red roses already in place. I relocated most of them and worked until they thrived. Then my real rose garden, helped out by a gift from a dear old lifelong friend, came into reality at the north east corner of the house. I established it under a big twisted mesquite tree that had apparently found a good source of water for it had grown a good fifteen to twenty feet high.

Somehow the roses and the mesquite were compatible. The added water and fertilizer made it thrive but the roses did well too. I’ve always been a bit amazed that you can plant a disorder of varied colors of roses close to each other but they never clash or seem not to look ‘right.’ That was the case. I even moved one of the original ones, clearly climbers, and put it right at the base of the big mesquite. It twined up into the tree and the red roses scattered through lacy spring green leaves were very striking!

I had iris too and planted some other bulb flowers like daffodils and tulips. They would go well for a couple of years and then fade out. I never was quite sure why but I kept trying. The iris did well enough and became so thick I divided them and shared cuttings with some friends several times. Along in the early 2000s, possibly the spring after Jim had passed in November 2003, I found a rose at Walmart that reminded me of my old Clarkdale rose. I planted it and now believe it was a Fairy Rose, very like the ones I recently acquired, kin to my old friend but not quite the same. The Fairy is pinker and perhaps not quite as many petals per flower but little and special.

Finally in 2008 I reached the point where it was time to leave Whetstone after twenty five years. Again I had to leave the roses. They were mostly getting old and not as hearty and lovely as they had been a decade or so before but still in place and hanging on. That was hard. For the next three years I was “homeless” until my brother and I left Colorado in the fall of 2011 and I bought this little house in Alamogordo. We intended to stay here the rest of our days but have come to see things we do not like or want to accept so yet another move may happen in the coming year, back “home” to Arizona a final time.

Again I will have to leave plants behind. The first spring I planted four climbers around the covered patio/porch on the south facing back of our house. They have done wonderfully well and bloom profusely in the spring and sporadically through the hot time to give another burst of flowers in the all. The colors are mixed—a pale ivory at the east corner, and then a rosy pink, a red and white and a blaze orange-red around the opposite corner and the west side. Meanwhile I also planted lilacs, probably my second favorite flower, and this last spring some forsythias for I love that very early sunshine bright display they provide.

Late this summer in one of those novelty-type seed catalogs, I saw some tiny roses, like those which I had been looking for half of forever. I ordered them and so as not to have to leave them behind, I planted them in large pots. They have thrived thus far and all three have bloomed. They are brighter pink than I had hoped but I now realize that is typical for the Fairy Rose. In time I may track down one even closer to my old favorite, probably having to order from England since they seem to favor the tiny ramblers more than the US growers do.

For now, I have these and the others as long as I am here and if I have my way, there will always be roses in my space.  Like me they are thorny at times and also like me they are generally tough and hardy, trying to bloom where they are planted and send out whatever beauty and sweetness they can regardless of where they find themselves. The flower for April-born is supposed to be the daisy but this Taurus April girl is all about roses.

Close up-mesquite rose

Whetstone rose garden

Fairy rose-first bloom

Alamogordo rose

Alamogordo rose 2