As mitochondrial waveform beings, roses are a special visual treat. For good reason they’re often called queen of flowers. With rose, it’s easy to describe her corpus with superlatives.
Roses resonate with our gentle sensual nature. Her delicately unfolding petals spiral with certain regularity- proving in that moment, rose is a still point outside of chaos.
She could be considered Yin as we are drawn to her. Initially she bears essence of young and tender beauty.
Other flowers are beautiful, but none quite so as rose though she has rivals like Pink peony.
With care and luck, roses can produce small desert plate-sized blooms of perfection.
Whether it’s the grace of her unfurling, as she slowly opens to show off her slightly shimmering velvety petals or perhaps her nose-pleasing fragrance. Rose has appeals with her scent vision, and textures-factors that give her special appeal.
Though any single rose only lasts a couple of weeks for a typical bloom from budding start to finish, rose is exceptionally attractive when she does.
When full, rose is a perfect eye candy. She soothes both brain and eye – and when we take time, our body. Perhaps it’s her petals but I’m guessing its her complete package- even her thorns.
Rose’s splendor and beauty, is not quite like any other. Whether she is tall with single hand sized blooms, central large bloom surrounded by court of smaller dwarfish buds, or more modest and miniature, roses are one of my favorite plants to grow even if they’re relatively demanding.
Unlike Jasmine whose blooms are ~the same, roses have unique personality.
And when her aroma – and strongest Yang quality, comes in she’ll be ready for relentless visits to her pistils from pollinators –large and small. Each one stimulating her tasty rose hips by their touch and pollen drop-offs.
Until then, she won’t attract while her bud is still tight; there’s no way for the aroma to escape or place for a bee to land.
Her maturation is stepwise.
Then it’s her time to garner phloem’s nutrients and says goodbye to her petals. As her petals drop off and there’s no flower left with the beginnings of fat bottom, her pistil and stamens sit atop prominently open to breezes.
As rose ages, she’s contribute her dried and desiccated petals to chaos- thus littering the ground with a mess. But no one much minds her random brown crinkles cluttering the visual landscape.
Even without looks she has value- for she’ll exude her sweet essence a long while- then being a treat of olfaction.
*****
In the cultivated garden, once rose becomes hippy the gardener takes out clippers. I mean why have a plant make a bunch of babies- if it’s the blooms (s)he’s after?
(Sugars go into both processes- blooms, hips, and defences; by pruning, rose stores leaves’ sugars- or so’s the idea.
Leaves remain soaking up the sun creating sugar fuel which phloem shuttles along with reactive hormones and cytokines to next new growing nodes.)
Plants developed and grown primarily for their spectacle, roses engage the heart subliminally. In my world, rose was discovered first by smell, with eyes later. By her rich scent, I was drawn in.
When full blooming, roses are eye catching bright bursts of color amidst green-like emerald.
To name a single favorite would be difficult, except not really in my case.
My favorite is the Rosa Rugosa, so move over David Austen, though I love the latter too.
*****
We, using the “royal we”, had two huge shrubs of Rosa Rugosa- by the ocean at my grandfather’s house, an immense stone built from boulders situated at the north end of a beach covered with palm-sized stones. There wasn’t sand, but that cut the mess down.
It was my father’s father home, and being somewhat estranged, we didn’t visit often.
Everything smelled like beach except the walk-in cool room spanning their expansive porch facing the sea. Underneath where the showers and beach toys were kept, as well as ice cream Hoodsie’s stored in the freezer, that whole area smelled of mildew.
When I was three or four while my parents, aunt and uncle played crickets or badminton I’d wander. Sports weren’t my thing, nor did I care for the shallow insincere niceties I heard in their voice tones.
Next the mortared stone pillars was where I found my first piano- and played my first notes though not very well.
Over the years, the piano was always neglected and way out of tune with sticking keys and silent ones. Doggedly, I’d try to make simple melodies anyway. It was even then, pretty frustrating.
I vaguely remember the first time I became conscious of Rosa Rugosa’s sweet and pungent room-filling aroma as it fought against ambient mildew stenchiness of the interior coldroom.
I might have asked, “What’s the name of the plant making perfume”? or something similar.[1]
“That’s a Rosa rugosa”, someone said, and I was hooked- I’d met my first rose.
My ticker tape brain noted it as “a smell worth living for”. I know that sounds trite, but it is good to tally things bringing delight!
I’d try to linger at those shrubs – then they seemed giant (probably about 6 feet across) and were always covered with bees. Even though Rosa is not especially pretty –- she’s mostly thorn and simple small roses, she’s exceptional from the pollinator’s perspective.
Rosa rugosa is grown for her fragrance -not prettiness or beauty. She’s no ‘David Austen’.
Rosa’s petals are ~one color – usually a deep clear purplish-red. I guess there’s also a white one now.
Rosa will grow in barren places like salty beaches and craggy hillsides; unlike her fellow species members, she’ll tolerate salt water spraying her-she’s a rare plant that can colonize beach dunes along with seagrass and the occasional tomato plant.
Unlike tea roses and grandifloras, bred to have 20-40 velvety lush petals, while her petals are velvety she’s only got 5. As a bloom, she’s quite diminutive.
Over the years, under certain weather conditions, the Rosa Rugosa’s pungent sweetness filled the outside air pervasively.
Then the scent would fill one’s nostrils with complex ambrosiac fragrance. Rose, geranium, apricot and cardamom and allspice at once co-mingled. Yes, she really is that heady!
Later one might see her big fat rose hips reflecting light off their shiny round red surfaces.
Over time, visiting the roses was a delightful respite from usually otherwise tense visit which started with admonitions and reminders and often ended in spankings. The adults tended to be drinking heavily with prominent undercurrents of recriminations. We had to be on “best behavior”- or we “wouldn’t be asked back” that is, my brother, sister and I (the oldest and oft times ringleader).
They didn’t say what you could do, unless you asked directly- which is why I often got into mischief.
So Rosa’s blossom’s unfolding isn’t terribly exciting or dramatic. I doubt her time action sequence is worth any drumroll. Yet if I were a pollinator, as plant she’s superb.
When her blossom opens wide, her stamens emerge – and she’s nectar, pollen, and propolis haven.
For bees her blossoms radiate in the ultraviolet – they see her red florescence as light striped runway. She really is quite remarkable; I’m pretty sure she’ll weather any climate changes.
[1] I was “incorrigibly” curious. Bless my mother, especially with my brother. We could make a mess together. “Incorrigible” was my grandmother’s declaration as we were driving in the car and she said it to my mother who was driving. Of course I looked it up. I agreed with the thrust of the word but not its connotation. Other than during a respite when I was ill, I felt driven by a version of relentless.
