Perfect Rose, Thorns and All

The pink English rose in the garden bed under my bedroom window is exquisite, and it is wonderfully fragrant too. Nothing I could say here this morning is up to expressing a tiny scrap of its perfection. Each and every bloom leaves me breathless.

My rose is called "Heritage", and it is one of first David Austin roses. To create it, Austin crossed an unknown seedling with a white floribunda (Iceberg) and a 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, one of the original floribundas (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 has to be replaced, but my departed soulmate adored it, and replace it I do. Ideally, there would be many heirloom and David Austin roses in the garden, but that is simply not possible. On winter nights, I pull out my rose references and dream, but the reality is that it is too cold here 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. Imagine that!