Tag: roses

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.

Antique Roses and Native Plants

It’s been a long day, and I’m beat. But the yard is really starting to wake up, so here is what’s in bloom this week.

Since the overwhelming goal of my gardening efforts is to make a happy habitat for all the animals that live here (including those of us with two legs), I have some plants that serve no purpose other than they are, to my eye, beautiful.

Like my antique roses. These are ancient, hardy roses that grow neglected in cemeteries and along fence rows, that nobody waters or prunes, and are all well adapted to grow and bloom with zero care. Zero care is sort of a specialty of mine.

Like this Mutabilis rose. It goes back to before 1894, blooms from spring to fall, and has beautiful flowers that start pale pink (like this one), and then get darker and darker until they turn crimson. I just planted this one a few weeks ago, and this is the first bloom.

Then there is Peggy Martin, the so-called Katrina rose. They call it that because a woman who had a huge rose garden had to evacuate because of Katrina, and her yard was underwater for two weeks. When the water went down, the only thing still alive was her Peggy Martin rose. If it won’t die with being underwater for two weeks, I am unlikely to kill it.

It’s a vigorous climbing rose, so I planted it at the corner of the vegetable garden, so it can run along the fence. I planted it over the winter, and it is blooming galore. The blooms fade fairly quickly in the hot sun, but more just come along.

Also, I planted it before I finished the fence, because of lumber prices. But now it’s starting to grow, and I have to hurry up and finish the fence to have something to trellis it on.

This rose isn’t an antique but is extremely special. When The Boy lived with us in 2020, he loved the color orange. We were in Kroger, back before the pandemic, and he saw a “miniature” rose with orange blooms in a pot in the floral department. He wanted it so bad. We bought it and planted it in one of the flower beds.

The whole time he lived with us, he watched it like a hawk, with near-daily reports to us on the blooms that appeared. When we planted it, I didn’t have high hopes of its survival. Such plants are usually pretty tender, sold to folks who manage to kill them pretty quickly. But he liked it, and it was less than $10, so why not risk it? Well, it survived the two winters since and is now in full bloom and I miss that kid something fierce right now.

Because of reasons, I didn’t put in a spring vegetable garden this year (lumber prices, for me to finish the raised beds, mainly). It’s not a huge deal – we can plant tomatoes here as late as the end of August and still get a crop. But anyway, the sage in my herb garden is blooming.

I love coneflowers. These are all varieties of purple echinacea or Purple Coneflower. Yes, one of them is white. It’s a variety bred for that trait. Coneflowers are native here, which means the pollinators love them and they are near bulletproof, but there are some native plant types that will lecture you about planting native plants that are bred to purpose (so-called nativars), like my white Purple Coneflowers. But we won’t invite those people over, anyway.

Not quite open yet, but it’s coming!
A white Purple Coneflower.
The pure species, with some tickseed in bloom behind it, and a slew of rudbeckia seedlings.

I need to do a whole post on our chickens. But here is our coop – my Mom says it’s the nicest chicken coop she has ever seen, but to be fair, she doesn’t get out much.

Last fall, a new neighbor moved in next door and cut down all the trees in his front yard. (I have opinions about this, but that’s another post). As a result, the whole north half of my front yard is now in full sun, so I put in blackberries and blueberries, among other things.

Ms. June is an 89-year-old lady who lives up the street, and who has an amazing shade garden in her backyard. She gave me these Indian Pinks, which are just showing out. I don’t have a good picture of it, but I also got a Japanese maple from here, which the Indian pinks are planted under. In 4-5 years, that’s gonna be nice.