like roses

blooms where you're planted

I will take roses however they come: hybrid tea roses on big-thorned stems in shockingly bright orange and yellow; old roses pale pink almost green; wild roses bright fuchsia and making a toothy hedge no one but the rabbits, squirrels, and birds can get through. I’ll take proliferating multiflora roses in New England’s abandoned lots and dog roses in hedgerows here in Ireland. I’ll take roses with a view of strip mall. I like roses leaning through someone else’s fence, or spilling over a wall. I have never really had roses of my own—they need land and a long time spent in one place and I have had neither—and so I follow others’ roses at the distance of the tenant or the visitor.

In the absence of my own garden, I also watch for hydrangeas blooming near a parking garage. I take note of the purslane coming through cracks in the sidewalk, and the American yellowrocket appearing like fireworks along the highway. Feeling myself out of place in the New England landscape, I come to like the way that purple lupines spread throughout Maine, where they, too, “should not be”—they are so part of the landscape that without them it would feel bereft. I like that lupines and other escapees give lie to the neatness of plants belonging or not belonging somewhere.

I like bright pink petunias that drop their seed from the windowboxes of the small-town bank and beget volunteer offspring in the gutter, year after year. I like the orchid growing among the high grass in loess hills. I like the linden trees planted decades ago along public rights-of-way for foot traffic, making late May or June a perfumer's delight to all passersby for about a week. I like moss on stone walls in humid climates and cherry trees in full bloom in grocery-store parking lots. I like the right of gentle trespass when I cross a vacant lot to look more closely at a flower, and I want it to be available to everyone equally.

But above all I like roses. They are finicky, disease-prone. Probably better fantasy plants and visited-through-the-fence plants than actual garden plants in terms of time commitment. I’m sure they make demands on their keepers; grown for mass distribution, they are managed with pesticides and herbicides that are toxic and persistent (florist education may include how to protect oneself from exposure to pesticides/fungicides from cut roses and other flowers). Rose forums are full of posts about mildew and black spot and aphids and other diseases and pests. Roses make their keepers sick, metaphorically, with worry, and physically via exposure to the toxins that make their industrial production possible.

(Last weekend, after having drafted this, I read Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses, which is everything I enjoy in a biography—and it’s more than a biography. It’s a beautiful book and very worth reading, whether at a bookshop or a library. Many of the things I say here are also present in Solnit’s book! While it is nominally a biography of George Orwell, it’s also a meditation on being human, on time, on politics and being a political actor, on writing, on the ways our actions have consequences we can’t imagine in advance, and on active optimism—and on roses. Solnit actually goes into depth on the rose industry, so if you haven’t read about it before and are interested, she will take you there. As you might expect from Solnit, Orwell’s Roses refuses the anesthetic of easy beauty in favor of a dose of attention to complexity—to difficulty and deep pleasure. I don’t always love her writing, but when she’s on, I do. And she is on in this book.)

Roses are a mark of placedness. Long-term commitment and, in the age of almost no winter and of hybrid plants, continual blooms to repay all those years of pruning. I see older women in their gardens here in Dublin pruning hybrid teas into neat vertical structures that keep away some of the mildew and aphids, open the plants to light and air. Their big flowers are peach-orange, yellow with pink edges, neon pink, pale purple.

It’s the old roses (also called garden roses) I really love. Especially the pink-peach ones and those greeny-gray-pink ones. The scented ones that are plush and cup-shaped and full of petals. So plush.

They are difficult to capture. Even in old fruit-and-flowers paintings, where they are beautiful, there is something stiff about them—stiffer than life. A rose is a living thing. Maybe it’s just that they are still once they are caught.

Jacob van Walscapelle: Still Life with Bouquet of Flowers (1677), Städel Museum 617. Source.

At the end of teaching I set out to make a dress that feels like roses. Ballerina-dress of my childhood imaginings, full, soft, many-layered. In the absence of a piece of land where for decades I can tend to roses, I got my hands on a piece of cloth, cut it, sewed it, have worn it many days already. Part of the ongoing project of learning to bloom, more or less, where I’m planted. Until I have roses where I’m planted.

Thanks for reading.