I'm kinda a sucker for most flowers, well any plant really, but I've always had a special affinity for roses. One of my earliest memories was of Great Grandpa's climbing red roses. He had a special touch with the thorny vines, and I remember scampering up the porch to their trailer house and smelling as many of the blooms as possible.
In an effort to have less to mow, I tilled up half of my front yard with the intentions of turning that space into a graveled garden with a bed of roses right in the center. I have dreams of sitting on my front deck, listening to the fountain that we made with the children when they were toddlers trickle onto the gemstones and minerals our farm's previous owner left bags of laying around, and inhaling the scent of roses in long North Idaho evenings. Sigh.
Anyway, like all dreams and aspirations, my plan requires some work. Using John Boy, our 42 horse John Deere tractor and the rototiller implement that works off of his PTO, the hubs tilled what he could of my future gravel/rose/fountain garden. I have been slowly removing the turf with a turf shovel in stolen bits of time here and there, and progress is being made.
The next order of business was to cut down a couple lodgepole pines for the garden's edging. I have lots and lots of lodgepole pines on my farm, whole forests of them. My Papa calls them Jack Pines or Dog Hair, because they do tend to grow as thick as a pupper's coat round these parts.
However, like all sequential plans, my garden order of operations got rearranged a bit. Monday, I turned forty. I still can't quite believe I have reached my fourth decade in life. Then I look back and ponder all the things that encompass my trip through this simulation, and yep, I can believe I am forty. And you know what, I like it!
And imagine my surprise when my family members each presented me with a gargantuan rose bush. My husband and each of my kids had picked out a rose bush for me, I can't really describe how touched I was, and you better believe hugs were dispensed!
Monday, I had taken the day off of work as I wanted to go to my son's track meet, and before we left, I went out and spent all morning planting those birthday roses. So even though my garden is half done, I can stop and smell the roses while I toiling away on the project, an unexpected positive development indeed.:)
Aside from all the just experience the awesomeness of it all joy that the rose garden will bring me, I also have plans to make things with some of the rose cultivars that will be going in the garden. One of my friends has an old-fashioned fragrant English Tea Rose that she is going to give me cuttings from, and growing in the area already are some Nootka Roses of the wild kind. I love rose scented soaps and creams and body products, so I am sure I will be distilling all sorts of extracts and essences from my rose collection in the future, as I already use the Nootka rose petals and hips for tea.
But the time has come to quit pondering all that I want to accomplish and get to work on what needs to be done. It's spring on the farm and that means I have more to do than hands and daylight to get it done. Yesterday, we built fence for hours, today is more of the same, but you can bet your last corn cob that I will be smiling every-time I walk past my birthday roses.
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's unfortunately not fragrant but far from stagnant iPhone.
