Endurance

NB: Each week I’m posting something from the archives of my more than 20 years of writing on the web. Sometimes it’s a social media post, sometimes a blog post, or (like today) it’s an excerpt from a newsletter issue originally published in October of 2025. Each entry gets updated with some modern context or point of view. – HH

A thing many people do not know about me is that I love Old Roses. Note the uppercase letters—I’m not talking about roses that are long in the tooth, but roses that have been in cultivation for a really long time—the term is usually applied to those roses introduced to the public before the introduction of Hybrid Tea roses in 1867. 

These roses are tough, are not grafted, and can withstand neglect. One garden writer calls them roses even dead people can grow, because in the US South, they are often found in old country graveyards, surviving on rainwater and little else. I have six rosebushes that are true Old Roses, and another six that were introduced later than 1867, but are still tough and hardy and grow on their own roots. Then there are some Knockouts I rescued on clearance in the big box garden center, but hell, I like them too. 

But my favorite rose is also the oldest in my collection—Old Blush. It’s the first Asian rose introduced to Europe, way back in 1752, nearly 30 years before the American Revolution. But in China, it had been cultivated for more than a thousand years at that point. 

But here is the thing you might not realize if plants are not a big thing in your life. Named varieties—like Old Blush—are prized for their attributes, such as the color of their flowers, the number of petals, or their size, for instance. But if you take seeds that develop from rose hips on an Old Blush bush, and plant them, you don’t get an Old Blush baby bush. You get a random bush that may or may not have the same attributes, just like how if you have red hair, your kid may, or may not, have red hair.  

The only way to get an Old Blush rose bush is to take a cutting from an existing Old Blush bush, and then root it, and then plant it. You are cloning the existing bush. It is 100% genetically identical to the “parent” bush. 

So, the Old Blush bush in my front yard, which blooms periodically throughout the year but reliably into late fall every year, is genetically the same bush that was being cultivated in China 1200 years ago. It began life as a cutting from a bush that was a cutting from a bush that was a cutting from a bush and so on, all the way back to 700 AD or so. 

Life is really chaotic right now. It feels like our nation is collapsing, and our way of life is ending, and for some of us, it’s really dangerous right now. At times like this, being the caretaker for a rose that is genetically 1300 years old, which has seen the collapse of empires and survived genocides and has outlived tyrants and stood watch over the graveyards of patriots seems really important right now, and gives me hope that we too, can not only endure, but be beautiful while we do it. 

UPDATE:
My nation is still clown pants, and October seems so quaint – before we invaded Venezuela, before we watched Renee Good get murdered on video, before we *checks notes* are threating to invade another NATO country.

But the thing Old Blush teaches me is still the same. There is always an empire. There are always tyrants. There is always someone who seeks to watch the world burn.

But there is also always someone fighting the empire. There is always a resistance movement. There is always someone with the water to pour on the flames.