Written by Monica Staton of Arky At Large
If you’ve ever gardened, chances are there are certain plants, or maybe a type of plant, that you’ve developed an attachment to. If you were to ask me my favorite plant, I’d probably give you a list: hydrangeas, with their lovely mop heads and tiny, delicate flowers; geraniums, which inexplicably remind me of my grandmother; or tulips, whose waxy, unfussy leaves and petals usher in the welcome spring. Yes, in the flower world I have many loves, but my very favorite flower, my old friend, is the rose.
This love for roses began early in my life and at the first opportunity I began my own tiny garden, growing roses in pots on the balcony of my college apartment. Once I had my first real patch of dirt, the modest yard of a rented duplex, the collection grew when my husband, then boyfriend, gave me the gift of a rosebush in lieu of cut flowers. Its glossy, deep green leaves and soft pink, fragrant blooms were absolutely perfect, and thus began a tradition – any time where one might receive a floral bouquet, for a birthday or anniversary, perhaps, I instead received a beautiful new specimen for my garden.
As each new rose was added, as I carefully tended and pruned through the spring, summer, and fall, my attachment to each one grew. When we left Fayetteville, Arkansas, and moved to Houston,Texas, in the winter of 2006, the roses were uprooted, potted and planted back yard of our rented home. When we moved back to Little Rock a year later, they were pulled, potted, and they came right back to Arkansas with us. They graced the porch of the house we rented there until finally finding their home in a bed created solely for them, at our very first purchased home. By the end of our final year there, in 2011, I had roughly ten plants, even adopting some poor Knockout roses and nursing them back to health. And then it happened. We moved again.
Initially this move, with regard to the rosebushes, anyway, seemed like any other. Granted, pulling up ten or so firmly rooted rosebushes, potting them, and shipping them to another state is a daunting task, but I was prepared to do it. By this time I was a pro. But then the unthinkable happened. When we finally got the right offer on our house, rather than the standard buyer’s request of including the refrigerator or the window treatments, our buyer insisted that I leave behind my roses. My roses – the ones that were in large part gifts from my husband, that I had toted to and fro for years by this point, the plants that were so dear to my heart. But we needed this. We needed to sell the house, we needed to move on. So, after a meltdown of fairly epic proportions, I conceded. I left them all, save one – the very first that my husband bought me so many years ago.
That rosebush now resides in Alabama and seems pretty happy here. It sat, halfway dormant and pitiful, for nearly a year before being given a place of honor in the front flower bed, where I can keep a close eye on it, alternately admiring its beauty and warding off the Japanese beetles. It now has a friend, too – a hearty floribunda with white blossoms, tinged with pink – so it seems my collection is finally growing again. And there’s something to learn from that rosebush, I think, even if it may sound a bit silly or contrived. It’s been dragged all over the place – certainly far more places than any rosebush could reasonably expect to travel. Sometimes it’s been doted on, sometimes it’s been stuck in a pot and left on the porch – a task to deal with when I finally found my footing in a new place and stopped pouting about where I’d landed. Given all that, one could say it is determined to grow anywhere, but what I think is that it’s determined to survive, to just be where it is and deal with what comes. Sometimes it will thrive, putting everything else to shame, sometimes it will do well to hold on to one last sickly leaf, but it always, always, makes it through.
Monica Staton is a dog wrangler, accountant, pretend blogger, and future farm owner. Though she married a Texan and resides in Alabama, she’s an Arkansan through and through.