A battle zone is what the garden is at the moment. Every day the kids and I spend some time in the front garden, making war with the roses. I do think that roses are lovely flowers, and I particularly like the ones that have a strong scent. I even like the look of rosehips in the garden after the flowers are long gone. However, I hate growing roses, and that might seem an odd statement given that there are at least 16 rose plants on our property (maybe even 20) and more on our common ground. I hate the black spot and aphid problems that they get before they even start flowering, but that is nothing compared to my hatred of pruning them.
I acquired seven rose plants when I purchased this house some 12 years ago. The tenant who lived here for 9 years more than tripled the number of roses in the garden. I have since given some to loving homes, and now that autumn is in full swing it is time to wage war with those that remain. I have scratches and splinters in my hands after my first pruning sessions. I try so hard to concentrate on not being spiked by those sharp prickles while part of my mind is trying to keep enough attention on the kids to see that they don’t run onto the road or do anything else dangerous. For the most part, the boys run around the garden, do loops from the front lawn, down the driveway, along the footpath and back up to the front lawn by using past a few rose bushes. Sometimes they get stuck on the prickliest of the roses as they push past them. Toby is obsessed with picking the remaining flowers and rose hips off the plants (and eating the rose hips), while Nathan just wants to cut things with either the secateurs or pruning saw.
I think it is going to take me a long time to prune the roses how I think they should be pruned (in contrast to how they have been pruned for the last 9 years), and there are a lot more scratches and splinters in store for me. Then again, I do have a gardening fork or two in the shed…..though some of the bushes are so fierce that I probably couldn’t even dig them up without injury to myself! Eh, I may as well just plod along with the pruning. Wish me luck……or at least some patience and perseverance.
