June, around my home, is the time to pick strawberries and visit rose gardens.
Strawberries are delicious, but the rose gardens provide my June sustenance.
Zepherine Drouhin
What do I do upon reaching a rose garden? I stroll about the garden walkways, reveling in the various scents and admiring the different sizes and designs, each a beauty in its own right. One of my favorites is the Gilded Sun, a rose that blooms in clusters. It’s a “floribunda” rose, in case that works on your Scrabble board.
Experts distinguish three rose types. Old Garden Roses have a heavenly perfume but generally bloom only once or twice a season. (In the 1820s, people started experimenting to mix the Old Garden Rose types with Asian varieties that bloomed repeatedly; hence the Modern Rose.) Modern Roses don’t have a strong scent; they are full like the Old Garden Roses but generally have sharper angled petals and bloom more frequently. Wild Roses have a flat petal design.
My mother liked taking June trips to the Kelleher Rose Garden in Boston. We would sit on the white marble benches and marvel at the magic.
My favorite is the Rose Garden at Elizabeth Park in Hartford, Connecticut. Rows of roses. Long arches of roses. Walls of roses. A profusion of roses. It is a garden of many colors.
Elizabeth Park
If you have a rose garden in your area, I recommend paying a visit.
Rose gardens of note:
America’s Rose Garden (Shreveport, LA)
The Huntington Rose Garden (San Marino, CA)
Kelleher Rose Garden (Boston, MA)
Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, NY Botanical Garden, Bronx
“There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.”—Henri Matisse
“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.”—Dale Carnegie
“The Rose is without an explanation; She blooms, because She blooms.”—Angelus Silesius
“Would Jove appoint some flower to reign, in matchless beauty on the plain, the Rose (mankind will all agree). The Rose the queen of flowers should be”— Sappho
TATTOO—Journeys on My Mind by TML Lamb
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.