My Mom the Rose Gardener

I live in Portland, Oregon, the Rose City. I find it hard to kill rose bushes in Portland. I am not a rose bush person, seems it took me several years to kill off a couple climbing roses in my yard. Roses grow like wild blackberries in this temperate climate.

My mom grew roses where it was a challenge and probably shouldn’t bother, that was Minnesota, land of devastating winter kill, good for lilacs and many species that like a good long dormancy, but that didn’t deter my mom, the rose gardener.

Each February, she would start paging thru the Jackson and Perkins rose catalog to select new roses, and to vote as member of the selection panel for best new rose of the year, probably dreaming of spring.

When the ice broke up, a sure sign of early spring, we would all head to the lake five miles north of town, on the gravel road in dads Lafayette four-door sedan. My mom the rose Gardener would help dad build a fire in the great wood oven from wood brought in from a pile next to the outhouse.

Then a wonderful thing happened, she would put loves of bread dough in those different size buttered tins she used once a week all her life, and the smell of her home made bread filled the still chilled cabin air.

Then she headed to her asparagus patch next to the wood pile and picked the first and best of the year, and had them boiling on top of the stove, she then snapped the red-and-white checked table cloth over the heavy oak table, and we sat down to a treat never forgotten by me, her homemade bread, and asparagus buttered to perfection and served in a now heated knotty pine cabin, built by my dad.

Next she would head to the garden, a sandy patch of ground, surrounded the her tall lilac bushes, where strange looking burlap and soil totems stood shoulder to shoulder guarding spindly branches within, where she slowly unwrapped each one, looking for survivors of the Minnesota winter.

My mom, the spindly red headed rose Gardner, never gave up trying to do the impossible, grow roses in Minnesota. I think that’s where I got my perseverance to continue being a stone fabricator all those years when there was no stone fabrication work to do in Portland, Oregon. Thank you Mom.