To Bed With Them!

Ah, roses, those wonderful roses. Climbers, bushes, ramblers, tea roses, floribundas, heritage, we love them all. Many consider they're more trouble than they're worth, but their timeless beauty surpasses that of all other garden plants. They have a rich heritage; gardeners have loved them for thousands upon thousands of years, and treasured their timed and timely flowering.

They certainly can be a lot of trouble to maintain. To know how and when to cut them back to ensure good health. To check them constantly for mildew, for rust, to remove countless tiny caterpillars that love to feast on their leaves and tender flower buds. To overlook the tender work of rose-loving aphids is to invite disaster, is yet another threat to the beauty of the unfolding buds to the glory of the flower revealed.

I remember a small house in Tokyo, and seeing the work of an elderly devoted gardener in his small enclosure around his home. He grew nothing but roses in his garden, and permitted them to be visible to passersby as he used a wire-type fence, not often seen there, rather than the traditional garden walls meant to hide one's personal Eden from the public eye. In early summer, all of his climbers, his shrubs, bushes, floribundas would somehow, as though by the magic of his sure thumb, bloom together in a blaze of colour, blessing the air with their fragrance.

Then, all too soon, this wonderful display would be no more. The shrubs, bushes, climbers, would all have been neatly trimmed, but brutally, by a gardener who so obviously knew the habits and needs of his roses. They would bloom again, months later, in a pale imitation of their former glory, but catching one's throat in the full appreciation of their spectacular display - for an all too brief, but unforgettable display. I still recall them, decades later.

My own garden is but a pale imitation of his - and for that matter, of any dedicated, knowledgeable gardener's. I will always be an apprentice gardener, but I was not born with the knowledge and the sureness that some, few people, appear to be blessed with. I had an uncle who was a "natural" gardener; of peasant stock he seemed to know exactly what to do and did so with ease. When I was a young wife and we bought our first modest home, he gave us a peach tree he had grown from a pit. In a very few years we had so many peaches I was hard put to bottle them all for winter preserves.

And then there's our daughter. She, like her paternal grandmother, turned out miraculously to be another natural gardener. It's as though the mantle of gardener descends from the heavens and settles gently upon the shoulders of such people blessed with this secret inner knowledge. A knowledge which they themselves do not claim to possess but which is abundantly clear to anyone like myself who strives mightily to duplicate that which they manage so effortlessly.

So, our roses have been put to bed for the winter. Nothing too special had to be done for the Explorer and rugosa series climbers and bushes, for they're hardy enough to make it through our chill frozen Canadian winters. Just a bit of cut-back here and there; removal of old branches to make way for the new, a bit of mounding, and that's it. But the floribundas, the tea roses, the miniatures, those beautiful and tender roses must be cared for far more carefully. Trimmed, mounded and rose cones placed carefully over them until early spring when they can be removed as the roses welcome the spring sun and begin their process of coming to life again.

We can wait. We have no other choice.