Day: December 22, 2014

Anna’s Promise (I), 9.10.14

I spend a good amount of time at our local rose gardens. I feel rather  fortunate to have two of them in my city, and they are walking distance from home. I can even manage to get to both in one day if I have a good amount of time (the round trip is probably about nine or ten miles when all is said and done). I don’t believe I’ll ever get weary of these places.

The Heritage Rose Garden features a lot of older roses, and I am fascinated by those. Even the names can be pretty fun to read: so many roses are named after people and I’ve found names such as Mrs. Dudley Cross, Lady Hillingdon, Ena Baxter, Reverend H. D’Ombrain and Monsieur Gourdault. (I saw no Patricia Emerson Mitchell rose. Sigh.) The area itself is a wee bit more difficult to handle: there is no shade and no lawn as one walks along the rows, and it can get mighty hot. Some of the roses there only bloom once per year,  or so I understand (I need to read up on this to verify), so I try to get there enough to catch the different varieties. They are pretty magnificent, and as far as I’m concerned worth dealing with the sun.

The Municipal Rose Garden has newer roses for the most part, and even has a test rose bed area where new hybrids are grown. It’s great fun to see what people are coming up with. The variety of rose colors is pretty amazing: from chocolate to deep purple, to that velvet red and fluorescent pink. With the fountain in the center (complete with ducks!) and lush green lawn the garden is cooler than the Heritage Garden.

I’m excited to see what our Municipal Rose Garden will look like when it is in full bloom again this spring (?): they are planting somewhere near 1,000 new roses this year. What a task that must be! When I was there last it appeared that a number of the roses had some sort of disease, so I do wonder if that’s one reason why they are redoing a large part of the garden. I do hope I see this rose I’ve posted above there again, though — I think it’s a gorgeous one.