The English rose in the garden plot under my bedroom window is exquisite, and it is wonderfully fragrant. Nothing I can say here is up to expressing even a tiny scrap of its perfection. Each and every bloom leaves me breathless.
My rose is called "Heritage", and it was one of David Austin's first roses. To create it, he crossed an unknown seedling with a white floribunda (Iceberg) and his own pink shrub rose (Wife of Bath). Through the latter, my rose has other illustrious forebears including a legendary hybrid tea rose called Madame Caroline Testout, an exquisite floribunda called Ma Perkins, and Austin's own magnificent Constance Spry.
Living as far north as I do, my rose requires a lot of coddling. Every few years it expires and has to be replaced, but my late soulmate adored it, and I plant another specimen for him. Ideally, there would be heirloom and David Austin roses in every corner of the garden, but that is not going to happen. On long winter nights, I pull out my rose references and dream, but the reality is that summers are too short here, and much of the year is too cold for many of the roses I long to cultivate.
How grand it would be to look out my window on a summer morning and see a whole garden of blooming roses with literary names: Maid Marian, The Lady of Shalott, Emily Bronte, Sceptered Isle and Sweet Juliet, to name a few. Just imagine! To have such a garden, I would have to move further south, and that is not going to happen.