A rosy outlook

Roses have always been my favourite flower. I’m not alone in that obviously; without even stopping to think or research any, I can think of countless every day expressions that we use in every day parlance; ‘ a rose by any other name’, ‘a rose between two thorns’, ‘coming up smelling of roses’ and so on.

As a child I remember my Nana loved them and had several abundant bushes in her sunny garden in Thornton Cleveleys where I played during precious holiday visits (while waiting for the adults to assemble buckets and spades for the beach). She used to throw her cold tea from the teapot on her roses, complete with tea-leaves, and evidently they thrived on it.

At home, my Mum – never really a keen gardener – struggled with the claggy clay soil of our Northampton new-build 1970’s home to create a border with a select few specimens of rose.  As they grew up in tandem with me, one in particular captured my childhood heart. It’s beautiful pale yellow blooms were edged with a delicate pink hue and this subtle pastel two-tone always struck me as far surpassing all the other monotone (though still lovely) roses she had planted. It always seemed to personify perfection somehow.  I was told its name was Peace. At the time, as a child, Peace was a fairly meaningless concept; it was just a name to me.

As I grew into adulthood and began to tend gardens of my own, roses continued to make an impression. The gable end of my cottage in Linton-in-Craven had a beautiful old climbing rose with a mass of delicate pink blooms and I spent many a summer evening feverishly dead-heading and revelling in the renewed buds. Happy days.

Peace always stuck in my memory though. As the years went on and I sought to grow more roses in my Grassington cottage garden, I fruitlessly searched garden centres for its name. It seemed the rose was no longer fashionable. By now, the significance of its name, and my inability to find it, did not escape me. Finally, however, I eventually found one courtesy of the internet and added it to my Christmas list.

I finally planted Peace in the depths of winter and was reminded of the beautiful Janis Joplin song which I sing occasionally, ‘The Rose’; ‘far beneath those bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun’s love in spring becomes the rose’. It took a while though. While other roses in the garden flourished, my poor Peace was very feeble. Eventually it did bloom a single flower, once a year if I was lucky, which simply made it all the more precious.

It felt very fitting that when I moved house next, I found myself living in a ‘Rose Cottage’. A fabulous rambling rose in the rear garden is a mass of tiny blossom like foam in the summer, while the front of the house is home to tall climbers that wave in front of our bedroom window in rich orange and arch over my office door in pretty pink. I’ve planted many more.

I couldn’t bear to leave Peace behind when we moved here, so I carefully uprooted her (it must be a her, surely) and planted her in the sunniest, most sheltered corner of the garden as I have read that roses don’t like wind. Thankfully she survived and once again I have watched her painfully slow growth. This year in Spring I was rewarded once again with a single perfect bloom. I shared it on social media in the hope it would lift a few other hearts as it did mine.

This autumn, a friend passed me a well-thumbed old paperback published in the 1970s called For Love of a Rose by Antonia Ridge. The cover featured an image that mirrored the one I’d posted and the sub-head read ‘story of the creation of the famous Peace rose’. The book had belonged to her mother, a survivor of the holocaust, and she asked if I would like to borrow it. Naturally, I was very touched. The book, a true story, was as lovely as the rose itself; moving and remarkable. I can’t do justice it to it one blog post, but I do attach below three images of pages from towards the end of the book which distil some of its essence. Uncannily, my finishing reading the book coincided exactly with my Peace producing a single flower for the autumn, just in time for me to return the book to my friend along with the bloom in a vase.  This really is one very, very special rose.