A few weeks ago we had a few rosebuds. The one I took a picture of did this:
This rosebush is a sort of tree-like entity. I don’t really notice its size when it’s not blossoming, but when it is, it’s a pretty imposing feature. It holds a small rowan tree in a sloppy embrace.
Its loose, fluffy, blushing white blooms are pretty, but their superpower is their scent. They simply blow away the florist’s demure long-stemmed rose, so obsessed with its elegantly-wrapped petals that it can’t even remember what it smells like to be a rose.
Here’s what it looks like now:
Poof! It’s festooned.
In the summer, and deep into autumn, this bush blooms with abandon. The summer I was pregnant, it provided a fresh rose for my bedside table every night. I was lucky that this was one of the few smells I could enjoy at the time. Coming from Ontario, where the plants are hardier and stingier, such abundance still feels unreal.
There’s actually another kind of rose engulfed in this mass:
These ones are floofy and pink and remind me of prom dresses for a reason I can’t quite pinpoint, because I can’t really picture a dress I could blame for that.
Around the front of the house there are more roses.
Among these are flowers of such an intense fuchsia that they make me think of the pink popsicles of my youth. I don’t know what flavour they were meant to be. We called them pink.
Orange popsicles! California poppy-sicles? A quick internet hunt suggests to me these flowers are California poppies, and that they are the official flower of California. The stuff I don’t know… I’d heard of California Raisins, but not California poppies.
Orange popsicles tasted like orange, only better. At least that’s what I remember.
Pink popsicles!
White popsicles! Those did exist, if I remember correctly, and I was not impressed. Coconut or something.
Green (lime) was probably my all-time favourite, and yellow (banana) was weird but occasionally enjoyable.
I doubt I’d be happy to let G have these now, although life is full of compromises.
For now, we have it easy. She’s blissfully ignorant of most of the treats I associate with summertime in childhood, and is thus far happy enough to suck on a frozen ball of spinach.
I am not Dave Barry. I mean, I am not making this up.