Giving the Roses a Run For

On those days when there is no snow or rain, when the temperature is somewhere above shivering and just below overheating, when there's no other chore that appeals to me, I go into the garden with my holey gloves and my rusted clippers, and I take on the rugosa roses. The attention they require is what keeps me from having a flower bed like the ones in the gardening books. The ill-mannered, unshapely, thorny sticks, with runners that grab hold and tangle themselves just beneath the soil are what prevents me from planting the crepe-petaled poppies of June, the un-fussy coreopsis of July, the Russian sage that apparently anyone can grow without trouble, all because I am caught in a timeless battle with barbed, overgrown shrub things, planted before I lived here, that save themselves from slaughter with their yearly bloom. Like babies with colic, just when you think you can't take it anymore, they smile.

In April I am not swayed by the promise of their vibrant appearance. Instead, this is my time to catch them, when they are not yet awake.  I pull dead leaves away from where they've matted themselves in a circle around each plant. I yank at the stubborn orange bittersweet vines that add to the snarl by slithering up each thorny spike of rose and cement their roots to the ground below. I inspect each cluster of growth to see if it is worthy of calling itself a shrub. I push down the relics that try to get away with another year by staying upright even though they're dead. I push them until they snap.  

Then June comes and oh, the lovely roses. The pink. The abundance. The fragrance. I take pleasure in watching my neighbors stroll by them, commenting on their beauty.  I put plastic bags on metal dowels in their midst to catch and kill the beetles that force them to lose their petals too soon. I am like every Disney headmistress, stepmother and queen, showing off the beauty of the captive innocents to the unsuspecting public, then belittling and abusing them when we are alone.

In July, we are alone. I think against saving the rose hips for jelly and behead them before their time. I decide there is no need for the roses, now in their setting days, to stretch the length of the perennial bed. So I am back with my clippers. I yank them out by their runners.  I fill and refill the wheelbarrow with their remains.  I visit the greenhouses and buy myself a container of something else. Something I will have forgotten I've planted by the time next April comes, when I am back outside, my dog nearby, leash staked into the ground, running after squirrels within the limits of her restraint.