I happened to pass a rose festival display the other day, long tables of prizewinning roses in slender cut crystal vases. My parents planted rose bushes in the front garden and by the back gate when they got married eighty five years ago, and so I stopped to look.
Of course there were new strains, colours: lemon to litmus-paper mauve, blushed, edged, and single-tone, skillfully produced. That kind of grafting had begun by the late ‘50s with the Peace rose and others, lemon sherbet and slight pink grading and washing delicately on the petals. They had little fragrance.
At the festival I saw roses trying to be hydrangeas, daffodils, carnations, orchids, daisies, lotus, fungi, crepe paper, plastic. They smelt of wet stem and vase-water.
I remember the dark red, almost-black roses my mother grew, the scent of three buds in a bedroom filling the house.
Of course there were new strains, colours: lemon to litmus-paper mauve, blushed, edged, and single-tone, skillfully produced. That kind of grafting had begun by the late ‘50s with the Peace rose and others, lemon sherbet and slight pink grading and washing delicately on the petals. They had little fragrance.
At the festival I saw roses trying to be hydrangeas, daffodils, carnations, orchids, daisies, lotus, fungi, crepe paper, plastic. They smelt of wet stem and vase-water.
I remember the dark red, almost-black roses my mother grew, the scent of three buds in a bedroom filling the house.
i have one of your roses pics on my PC front pge
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