Last Roses of the Year

Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2003 – 5:56 p.m.

2003-11-12 5:56

The weather is now turning colder. We have had a fair bit of indian summer the last couple of weeks so the garden has been blooming quite well. Last week the weather folk predicted a frost Saturday night so I went out and pick blooms in the rain on Saturday. Boy did my fingers get cold! Even though I thought that all existing blooms would get hit that night, I stuck to one of my basic tenets of the garden: Never pick all the color. Leave some blossoms on the bushes so that the garden continues to look good. As it is, most of my miniatures don’t really pick well; they tend to be either too far along (fully open) or not far enough, so that leaves a fair amount of color. The Fairy is going gangbusters so I leave it (though I may pick some whole branches from it tonight). On the rest of the bushes, I try to leave a couple of blossoms that are not really suitable to picking but still look fine in the garden.

In the end, I had a bucket of blooms that I arranged in several vases around the living room. With the cats, it often doesn’t work to leave vases on the tables…. Lafayette tends to get up and try to drink from them, knocking them over and making a mess.

At one point this weekend, I looked up from what I was doing in the living room and I had a “rose moment”. There was a vase of roses on the piano and the light was illuminating it from the side. It was like something out of a painting or photograph. Subtle lighting and the angle of view just combined perfectly to show off the blooms while hiding the imperfections. Add to that the subtle fragrance wafting through the room and you can see that it was pretty much perfect.

Turns out that it really didn’t get as cold as they predicted so I still have some blooms that were tight buds earlier in the week that are coming out now. Of course they are now predicting a hard freeze for Friday night so I guess I need to get out and pick another batch. [grin] That’s good because a number of the last batch are starting to drop their petals.

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