What a Story This Rose Could Tell . . .

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