Hello Friends!
Many long years ago, I grew up in the next street over in a house that had been in my family for three or more generations. Along one hedge was a massive rambling rose that in Spring and Summer was covered in thousands of tiny pink flowers.
I recall my mother telling me that it had been planted there by my Great Grandmother. Even if she was wrong and it was my Grandmother, that rambler has been there for nigh on seventy years, maybe closer to eighty.
Until recently, I was able to peep over the wall of an adjacent garden and see that ancient rose still there, giving it's all. In the last couple of years, the new owners have built a high fence, and I can no longer see where the rose blooms. I can only hope now that it is still there.
A short while ago, I noticed a pink rambling rose flowering on a neighbour's fence. I told the neighbour how very like the rose we had in my childhood home this looked. She then shared with me that her rose that I admired so much as it reminded me of the one from my childhood had come from the same garden. Indeed, it was a cutting from the very rose that was growing there in my childhood, that I knew and loved so well.
Much to my delight, she gave me a cutting that she had taken a few weeks earlier that was already established in a little pot. I brought it home and looked after it while it established, and the following year, I potted it into a larger terracotta pot. It didn't do too well last year, but this year it is put on some considerable growth and for the first time, has produced a single flower.
I am going to have to make an effort to try and find out if the new owners of my childhood home do indeed still have that rose on the hedge, because I think they might like to know its history.
Here are some photos the one along the wall is growing on my neighbor's wall. As I call it, the Daughter of Great Grandma's rose. I hope mine will continue to flourish!
Do you have any inherited plants, or ones you know to be old in your garden?
Until next time
Debbie xx
Oh how wonderful to have that link with your family. That's pretty good going and great to have a cutting that is thriving. When we moved here I inherited a Paul's Himalayan Musk climbing rose which is up one tree and across two more so has a good age to it, and I left its 30 year old compatriot behind me at Ynyswen, which I had planted.
ReplyDeleteThat's beautiful - I do hope the people have kept it
ReplyDeleteThat’s beautiful, Debbie. Dadcu and Bopa had the same one when they lived in Back Lane. I loved it. We used armfuls of it to decorate a rainbow fairies float at St. David’s Carnival when Pauline was little. I remember Pammy and Patty John were also on the float. Frances John and Mam and the other mums made it beautiful. Masses of roses decorated the truck with a rainbow arch, the seven rainbow fairies in their crepe paper home made dresses feeling like queens sitting under the rainbow. I’ll have to try to find the photo though it will be black and white. Mam had a beautiful fragrant old fashioned heavy-headed dark red rose (Josephine?) in the garden of No. 5 which was from a cutting in her dad’s garden from a bush planted by him or his mum. Malcolm took a cutting and it’s thriving in his garden. The continuity is lovely. I always feel very nostalgic when I see the roses you mention. When we were children everyone called them Seven Sisters roses, presumably because of the abundance of blooms. So very pretty! I’m glad yours is thriving.
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful story! The rose is so pretty. Xx
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely story and I am so glad you have a cutting and it is growing. It is a beautiful rose. When we moved well over 40 years ago into our house there was a Whitebeam sapling growing and now it is a beautiful huge tree.
ReplyDeleteI'm so happy that your cutting is growing well. I do hope you stop and let the people in your old home know the history of the rose. That will be another blog post, eh? It's a beautiful rose!
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely neighbor and kind gesture. And a very beautiful story as well -- such a marvelous connection to your past. I love this, Deb.
ReplyDeleteThat is a beautiful rose ... what a fabulous colour.
ReplyDeleteMay your rose continue to do well.
All the best Jan