Seduced by a Rose
Peace Rose at Sorosis Park’s Veterans Memorial Rose Garden.
The Rose Seduction by Dana Greyson
You can complain because roses have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses—Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr
Dana Greyson
I used to believe the only good rose was a cut rose, a bouquet precut for me by someone else. My ex-husband never gave me roses because his mother convinced him you only gave your lover roses when you’d done something wrong. I admired public rose gardens but cursed the thorny flesh-tearing monsters left in my yard by prior owners. What possessed them to plant those fussy things that asked for far more than I was willing to give? Those beasts were stubborn as heck to remove. Despite my repeated murderous efforts to dig them out and hack them away, they kept coming back, uglier each time.
Winter freeze killed the grafts that used to blossom beautifully on the roses in my yard. What remained was the root stock, with shoots that sprang out every which way with abundance yet nary a bloom. This year, I paid someone to remove the roses.
In our annual, hands-on rose pruning class, we removed all the dead wood from the great 2024 freeze. We cut many of the rose bushes nearly down to the ground. Marilyn Richardson convinced Wasco County Master Gardeners (WCMG) to take on the Veterans Memorial Rose Garden’s care. This year, several other master gardeners who share my lack of rose expertise banded together to tend the rose garden with Marilyn because we like working together.
And work we did…beyond the basic pruning, fertilizing, spraying and weeding, we did battle with the buggies—ravenous European sawfly larvae and pesky aphids. We struggled with powdery mildew, finicky irrigation, and hungry deer. Then there’s the challenge of talking to visitors with scissors who believe this is their personal cutting garden. It is not.
As we worked, we often caught snatches of polarizing political conversation from the passersby. Regardless of whether we shared the same political beliefs or not, nearly everyone stopped to thank us, and commented on how lovely the roses looked. This gives me hope that while we may not agree on politics, we can at least agree that we love roses. Over thirty peace roses flourish in our rose garden. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that during the World Wars, European rose growers feared the roses’ destruction in a war-torn land and sent them to the United States.
Back on the home front, the lovely man I am now married to gave me a rose blossom that never fades in its liquid-filled glass globe. He didn’t do it as a peace offering, or because he did anything wrong. He did it simply because he knew I would love it. The blossom sits on my office desk, where I admire it every day.
For the first time ever this spring, I bought a pair of rose bushes for our yard. My husband enjoys his view of the roses from his man cave. They serve as a reminder that I will care as lovingly for him as I do them.
