Naked in the Roses: Breathing in the New Year

Friday, January 1, 2010

Breathing in the New Year

Today I took a break. Keeping up with the process has already told its tale.
My pruning hand had swollen up like a soufflé last night, so I gave it a rest.
I spent the day painting, trying to capture rain and fog on the gentle hills of Sebastopol. It did me good, and my hand has deflated to something like normal.

We gardeners push ourselves sometimes. Like the artists we are, enveloped by our canvases, we suffer the skin tears and puncture wounds without flinching. Painting a landscape is not unlike pruning. Clip, clip, clip; daube, daube, daube. It takes a lot of the same thing, again and again, to get to the end. And, like painters, while we may work toward a goal, it is the process that contains much of the meaning.

While I prune in January, I'm often sketching May in my mind. Imagining how this corner will be improved, dreaming about new planting combinations, I see the garden more perfectly at these times than I ever perceive it to be when May finally comes. We are dreamers, visionaries, artists, ever anticipating the work, always painting the perfect garden of our minds.

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Preserving a Garden of Old and Rare Roses—Can it be Done?

Preserving a Garden of Old and Rare Roses—Can it be Done?

In my garden I grow over 4000 rose plants of all classes and types. Like a museum of roses, the garden tells the story of roses from the most ancient to the most recent. But, unlike a museum, it is a living organism, always growing through cycles of bloom and renewal. Along with the roses live gophers, hummingbirds, pigmy rabbits, the occasional deer, and a host of other life forces—some welcome, and others not. The garden and its collection of rare roses are known by many rose lovers around the world, and have been shared with other gardeners and gardens for the past 26 years. Today it stands on the edge of disappearing, and in this blog I hope to share with you both the peril that threatens it and the effort that has begun now to preserve it.

The Friends of Vintage Roses
A garden is a temporary thing, it is often said, destined to disappear with its creator. But I do not agree. A garden is an idea that once experienced lives in the minds of those who can imagine it. It belongs to no one and to everyone. Once I understood this my garden began to live. It has lived for many years now in the minds of those who have visited it, and those who have only imagined visiting it. It has the power to elevate all of us to Cloud Eleven.

Roses are powerful life forces, pulled from the imaginations of artists over many centuries of human existence. They speak to us, and if we listen and can hear them, they have much to say. They transcend their creators, their admirers and their custodians---they transcend us and inspire us. Their powerful sway bore fruit in a gathering of people who wanted them and heard them calling---the Friends of Vintage Roses. This scattered group began to coalesce about a decade ago one May in the garden I had built. These people have pulled together once again for the roses to keep alive a vision, a dream and an inspiration. Their hard work and pragmatism account for the survival of so many beautiful beings, and they work now to spread the word, the joy and the delight of old roses.