The rose, a memory keeper
Nostalgia, joy and sadness
Roses are magical. Their rich, evocative scent wafts through the summer air, and with just one sniff I’m deep in my memory, back to childhood: eating Fry’s Turkish Delight after Quaker meeting on a Sunday with my dad, long warm days making rose petal perfume.
Back in the present, I have two kinds in my garden: an old rambling rose, light pink Albertine, and the darker, reddish pink Starlight Express. Albertine has a strong, sweet scent, and was bought our from a garden centre the summer after we moved into our cottage, a decade ago. It turns out Albertine was also the rose my parents had in their garden, so the scent really is familiar. Starlight Express was a present from my friend Lyndsey and her husband after my daughter was born. Sadly, Lyndsey’s husband has since passed away, but I have such vivid memories of all of us sitting together in my little garden on a sunny day, surrounded by nappies drying on the washing line, making exciting plans for a small non-profit we worked on together.
Before we moved to our current house one of the few things I grew in our rental cottage was roses. We didn’t have a proper growing space, and I didn’t know anything about gardening, but I’d bought two roses from the supermarket on a whim, a red one and a yellow one, and planted them in some large pots outside the house. I didn’t do much to care for them, but they still grew! The red rose flowered every year, but the yellow never did - until the summer before we left, when cheerful yellow blooms suddenly appeared. I was so sad to leave them.
I love to bring roses inside, placing them in jam jars to fill the whole house with their gorgeous perfume. Recently, I’ve also used rose petals to make a gin infusion, for my sister’s birthday. To do this, fill a jar with fresh chopped rose petals, fill with gin, then leave to infuse for 24 hours. After this time, strain through a muslin cloth, and bottle. As I don’t drink, I didn’t try it, but the gin went a lovely orangy pink colour, and smelled of roses. According to my sister, it was delicious. Years ago, I also distilled my own rosewater, which smelled beautiful and was great as a face wash. You can find instructions similar to the method I used here (see half way down the page for the distillation method).
Nowadays, I do my best to look after my roses. To keep them flowering all through the summer, I keep on top of deadheading - cutting off the flowerheads that have finished blooming, to encourage more to come through. However, one part of rose care I have to admit I’m not good at is supporting the roses, and cutting them back at the right time. They are growing up the fence in my garden - initially we put up some wire to support them and encourage them to climb, but they’ve long since become too heavy and snapped it. Now they sprawl up the fence and but also out into the garden, doing their own thing. I cut them back when they take over too much, but I’m never really sure how or when to do this properly.
Eventually, I’d like to learn to take rose cuttings, which will develop into new plants. I’d love more roses and they are so expensive to buy, but so far I haven’t got round to researching this properly. I think you can only do this at certain times of year too, so usually when I think about it, I’ve missed the window. One day!
Over the last month or so, the roses in my garden have been exploding into life: I’ve never seen so many flowers all at once. But, here in the UK, last week we had an extreme heatwave, with temperatures getting up to nearly 40 celsius, almost unknown here. The heat felt oppressive and dangerous, in a country where most buildings don’t have air conditioning and are built to retain heat. Schools closed, hospitals were overwhelmed, and public transport stopped running.
Devastatingly, we lost my little dog Poppy during this time. At 17 and a half years old, she was very elderly, and after days of the extreme heat she stopped eating, became very weak and was no longer able to walk, so we had to take her to the vets to say goodbye.
And that day, the petals dropped off every single rose blooming in my garden.
We’re all struggling to adapt to life without her. Midsummer and the scent of roses will now have a new layer of memory, of loss.
I am so sorry for your loss🫂