They've arrived!!!

This is it. No turning back. I'm starting over.
The box got here last night and my heart did a little flip. =)




My heart did a little flip probably from excitement.
...thinking...
...no...
It probably flipped because we haven't dug 22 big holes, nor have we purchased and installed the patio stone, nor have we purchased the mulch, manure and peat moss.

Most likely my heart flipped because last year's roses look like this:

Eden (in the future-patio area)

























Jude the Obscure (looking fairly obscure)
























Graham the Dead (looking more obscure than Jude)


























Blush Noisette (marking the Serenade spot by the deck)




















The deck roses are ok, I guess. They spent the winter by the back door so I could keep an eye on them.


So here I am spending a couple hundred to repeat last year's Rose Adventure.
hmm...
I'm pretty sure I had fun last year.
...thinking...
...no...
I'm fairly certain the roses were beautiful.
...thinking...
...no, that's not it...

Probably I liked the smell of the roses.
...not frequently enough to remember this chilly February day...
I guess I spent that money on HOPE.
Festoons of it, bushes of it, vases around the house of it, enough to leave anonymously on neighbors' doorsteps. And yes, Hope will have a lovely fragrance.

In which case, if one can buy Hope for a couple bucks, then that's a real bargain. For now, this is what Hope looks like:

Ugliness vs Beauty

Today my father-in-law managed to escape when I wasn't looking. Alzheimer's sure is a rough disease. It's a prison of confusion and ugliness. It's a maze of torturous proportion. It's a video set on endless looping. Alzheimer's can turn a simple object or false memory into the center of the universe and then force it's victim to pay homage for hours on end.

Fortunately for both my father-in-law and me, he got distracted by piles of pine needles on a junked car windshield in our side yard. He spent the next hour hand-picking pine needles off the windshield. By the time he finished, he was content to go back in the house. Which meant I in turn no longer had to look at the disgusting junked car covered with pine needles.

Yup, the junked car is a view you'll never see in my rose blog. There's actually two cars, one pickup and an old van that are good for nothing but an ugly view. Even more unfortunately, they're in shade so I can't buy some kind of creeping, rambling roses that are good for covering whole buildings. Believe me, I tried and one of these days I'll find the perfect plant to cover the whole mess.

In the meantime, I choose to turn my back on the ugliness in life and only focus on beauty. Which is why, this day, February 20, 2007, there are no less than 22 bare root English Roses from David Austin on their way to my house. If Ugliness wants to put up a fight, it might as well give up right now. Beauty is going to win.

=)

And one of these days, my own home-grown roses will grace my table instead of store-bought roses.

Rose plan for 2007

It's still winter here. Nothing is growing. Everything is cold. I'm a caretaker for an Alzheimer's patient around the clock.

Therefore, I can not explain why my table looked like this a couple days ago.Note all the little paper tags placed on my garden layout. Note the green sheet of paper with more rose lists. Note the store-bought roses in the vase. It all adds up to... 22 new roses.
Twenty two.
Well, plus two more that the kids picked out at the last minute.
Which means my beloved Rose Support Team will have to dig 24 big holes around the property. That's 8 more than last year.

I did have the decency to ask my two main diggers if they minded digging some holes. They didn't mind! Which is really good because that will make the chore much easier once the roses arrive. And I also cleared the location of 24 more roses with the Rose Support Team. I asked important questions like: Is there a telephone line in this location? Are there septic tank issues in this spot? If I put a rose here, will we hit the TV cable? Which means this year we won't cut our phone and cable lines repeatedly like last year.

What possessed me to get so many? Why roses? Why this year?
After last spring, I told myself I would NEVER buy that many roses again. But then... the catalog arrived. I spent a long time gazing at David Austin rose photos on the Garden Web Rose Forum.
And I resurrected my visions of rose festoons.

Twenty four doesn't sound unmanageable right now. I'm optimistic!