The Rose Basket
Sharing the Bounty
Several years ago I started planting rose bushes around the ridge that had been cut clean when the bulldozer scraped the pad for our new home. I was told that you can not have roses in the mountains because they are deer candy. If the deer don't mow them down from above, the lagomorphs would get them at ground level and the gophers would devour their roots.
Despite those ominous warnings, I bought rose bushes and planted them. I built baskets of stainless steel mesh to protect their roots from the gophers, surrounded them with rabbit wire and hoped that our large Tosa (Japanese Mastiff), Mudge, who had taken to patrolling around our house as his sacred duty would keep the deer away from the floral candy.
We watered the rose bushes by hand until we learned how to put in drip systems with timers to provide them with the elixir of life, water. The biggest threat to the new roses turned out to be from the smallest of critters, the gopher. It was very disheartening to see a vibrant green plant go suddenly brown after having its life line severed under the soil. I suppose it would have made it easier if the gopher had eaten all of the roots because it was hungry. But it just chewed right through the center root and suddenly there was no anchor for the plant.
After a gopher had cut through two of the three main roots of one of my wife's favorite roses, "Paradise," I learned to make my gopher wire come up a few inches above the ground. If you don't, the little monsters will pop up out of their holes run across the ground and dive into the small pond of rich soil and fertilizer you have so carefully made for the new rose.
I pruned Paradise's stalks that had turned brown with their roots gone. Then, I dug up what was left of it along with its one remaining root. I made a new, higher wire basket for the rose and replanted it. Paradise was grateful that I did not give up on it and pitch it over the bank as I had done with other rose bushes that the gophers had savaged. The following year it came back with beautiful blooms in defiance of its gopher attack.
On Fridays, my wife, Lura meets with her quilting friendship group, usually at Betty's home in Mudge Ranch. The deer are tame in Mudge Ranch and you often see them during the day happily munching away in someone's front yard. Generations of deer have grown up there so the yards are kept clean of most plants. Lura delights in sharing our bounty of mountain roses with the gals in her quilt group that are rose deprived. She often refers to it as "Betty's Rose Basket." One June morning, the basket was overflowing with color and before she left for Betty's, I spent a bit of time photographing it.
It is the rose gardens of the world that nourish our Souls to help us get through the darkest of times. The beauty of nature reminds us that we exist because God loves us and it is the sharing of that bounty that brings us all closer to home.
Click here to look at the images of my rose garden.