Floribunda

Some women go to the mall and buy clothes they can't afford when their husband travels. I loaded the girls into the car and drove them down by the railway, where we walked gaga, open-mouthed, through the freshly stocked Agway Nursery. Elspeth ran in circles through the cedar mulch around the groaning rose table.

Ah, hah! I've been wanting one of those. . .John F. Kennedy's sturdy stalk, his meaty branches and purple thorns. A photo hanging from a branch promises salivating-inducing white hybrid tea blossoms. I can smell it now! Oooooo. Want it! Want it!

I do not get this shivery, primal response when viewing bean starts or shoots of male asparagus. But roses--the thought of my garden full of blossoms, my house swooning with their scent--I would happily exchange my birthright for a floribunda or an English tea: jolly ruffly buxom women.

Is it because I was born in Bangladesh, near India, and as a child visited meltingly beautiful tea rose gardens? Is it because my childhood is perfumed with rose-water and incense? Is it because in Kenya my mother always arranged a bouquet of long-stemmed blossoms for our dining room table?

My heart fails me when I see roses stuffed carelessly in a vase, without their stems sliced at an angle. Let's see--boiling water, sugar, a sharp knife or scissors, which do you use? And always trim off the bottom leaves! Don't you even care? I have more than once fished yellowing, drooping roses from a trash can to bind, hang, dry, to snip off weary heads, floating them in a bowl of water.

There is something ancient in a rose, something so other that I feel overwhelmed by gratitude that one would bloom in my garden!

Last season I trotted down to the closing fall sales at "Jill's Jungle." Jill showed me a wonderful tea standard. Its slender trunk spilled into handfuls of perfect pink flowers and delicate green leaves. I handed over an unusually high sum (for our pocketbook) and tenderly drove the standard home to my front garden. I had spent weeks digging up the grass by hand with a trowel, and the standard tea would be an absolutely perfect centerpiece for my slowly evolving rose garden. The girls mucked about in the soil while I dug a huge hole and planted the standard. And it was elegant, it was perfect, it was divine.

Out of the mountains the wind gusted down our street. Dark clouds rolled like Pharaoh's chariots across the bright summer sky. I picked up the girls; hair whipped around our faces--and we ran up onto the porch just as huge drops of rain spattered our path.

From the living room window, I watched debris and leaves blowing across our yard and down our street. The rose standard with its tender blossoms bent in the force of the gale. . .

Snap!

That sad, violent sound still hangs like a ghost over my rose garden. After the storm calmed down and the rain was at a steady fall, I waded out through the mud in the darkness. In the late evening, holding an umbrella with one hand and twine and tape with the other, I tried to mend the amputee. I did not have high hopes.

You can find the little pink buds, still fragrant, on a small silver tray in my bathroom. That, and a stalk I left in the ground, is what remains of that royal rose standard.

Will the stalk send out shoots? Has it somehow lived after all, through the winter winds? I'm doubtful but then I'm always doubtful about seeds, and measly little bedding plants, and bare shrubs. Spring is full of miracles, and high summer yields one surprise after the next.