MindSpinner

This spring I watched the roses calculate, after killing frost, answering branch by branch the question, “How far back must I die in order to live?” The dying back seemed to consolidate life by means of retreat to some point from which return would be possible. Sometimes six inches was enough - just the tender new growth that dried to rustling papery skirts drooping from every branch. Sometimes one fork lived and another died. Two roses, the hybrid teas, died back all the way to the ground.

I waited a long time to trim the dead branches from the living. For a long time, I thought there would be nothing.

The Memorial Day Rose sprouted from its forked base in late April and lifts three blooms today on stems a third last year’s height. Rose Lasting Love looked for months to be no more than a thorny gray ladder for a clematis to climb, the one with purple blooms like tall fairy hats. The clematis looked so forlorn and lost I twined it on a trellis. Only yesterday I saw among the tangle of its vines new rose leaves, green tinged with burgundy. Frost had not killed the root of the rose: later this summer there will be blooms.