When I was a kid we had to walk about a kilometre home after school, with an ice block if we were lucky or at least a lick of someone else’s. There were three ways we could go, the short way to see the horses, the long way with all the traffic – or the rose garden way.
The rose way was irresistible. So were the roses. They poked their prickly legs out of deep beds of decayed manure. (Their owner knew about the horse paddock too.) The roses bloomed nearly all the year – at least that’s what it seemed like then.
We could smell the roses by the time we were half way down the hill. (Rose scents float upward on hot days – stand upwind and uphill one day and sniff.) We never yelled on that stretch of footpath, so the rose owner wouldn’t hear us and know we were coming … though of course in hindsight he must have known that we came past at the same time every afternoon.
There were roses under the eaves, rose in pots on the patio, roses in neat circular beds in the lawn. There were also roses spilling over the front fence, and these were the ones we loved.
Every afternoon as we drew closer we’d check carefully to make sure he wasn’t around. And then we’d creep closer and closer… and sniff: great, deep breaths of incredible perfume. Sometimes we’d stroke the petals too: pink and yellow ‘Peace’ petals, rich pink, tea scented ‘Monsieur Tillier’ or deep red ‘Papa Meilland’ cool and incredibly velvety on summer afternoons.
Then he’d yell at us. It happened every afternoon, we’d sniff the roses and he’d shriek at us, parting the lace curtains and roaring through the window to ‘Get out of it, you brats, or I’ll call the cops.’
And every afternoon we ran, till finally- as he hoped- we were more frightened of his yells than we were attracted by his roses, and we never walked that way again.
For years whenever I thought of roses I thought of a mean gardener who yelled at us. I hated roses, never thought I’d grow one in the garden that I might have when I grew up. (In those days I thought it would be filled with dogs rather than flowers.)
Then I met another rose grower, one who’d never bought a rose bush in her life. There were roses up the back, sprawling over the fence, roses out the front with long prickly legs – but all of them had come from cuttings, offered in damp newspaper by friends, ‘borrowed’ when she visited or coaxed from gardeners in public parks with whom she’d struck up a conversation.
Most of my roses now grow from hers – bits of pruning stuck in the ground in the sandy damp soil under the apple trees, hoiked out after a year or two and planted where the wallabies hopefully won’t notice them till they’ve got a toe hold.
And now whenever I look at my roses I remember her…not him.
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