Every rose has a story

A good old friend of my mum, Aunt Mary, is an old hand at gardening. Only 1 out of her 5 children share her passion towards gardening especially with old garden roses. She's one of those people who appreciate my interest in gardening and understand my enthusiasm about collecting plants. Being in retirement, she and her husband travel frequently to visit their 5 children and grandchildren who live all over the place in europe. If 5 children and 7 grandchildren is not enough to keep her busy travelling and visiting, she also had unofficially adopted me as one of her kids. Your mum said, "if anything happen to me Mary, you will see to it that Rae is not lost by herself," that's what she always repeat to me whenever she saw I'm a little lost navigating my life.

While I am never short of thoughtful people who cared about my well being, aunt Mary is also a big contributor to my garden. Everywhere she go, without fail, there's always something she brought home for my garden, a bag of bulbs from Holland, or cuttings of all sorts from Cyprus or Germany or anywhere she saw plants, she saw me in her head. Over the years, my garden had turned into a zoo of plants, some are still alive and some are dead because I don't know the identity of the plants making it real tricky to provide proper care especially during the freezing cold winter months.

One day she went to visit her daughter in Holland and brought home a tiny 2 inches soft wood cuttings. Over the phone, she said she had taken cuttings from Paul Himalayan Musk, a rose which I wanted to grow into tall trees. She took one cutting for herself and another one is for me but she couldn't manage to take it out of the moist wrappings because immediately when she got home, her ailing husband was admitted to the hospital. She asked me to take care of the 2 cuttings while she gathered her family together to deal with her situation.

I met her half way while she was on the way to the hospital and took the container containing the 2 rose cuttings, brought home, placed it in a small hole mixed with sand and soil mixture at the edge of a shady retaining wall. That was in September 2007.

Few months later, the cuttings took root and survived the winter. Aunt Mary was very happy that I managed to root her cuttings and she was very sure that she had taken the cuttings from Paul Himalayan Musk, which can grow to enoumous height and size. By spring 2008, the 2 inch cuttings had grown 3 feet tall and producing little buds. On the 16th of May 2008, the first bloom opened up and it was the same day we attended the funeral of aunt Mary's husband.

I cut the first bloom and brought it to the graveyard along with the florist wreath which represented our family in mourning to her loss. It was a cold drizzling windy grey spring day to bury a great man but it was a day worth remembering.

Dressed in all black, her silver grey hair made her skin looked pale and transparent like a wax. She looked peaceful but drained of emotions and I could read every single lines on her face as we hugged and whispered words of comfort. When I handed her the single bloom from the 2 inches rose cuttings she had entrusted into my care, her face suddenly lighted up with a smile of of awe. She took the rose from my hand and brought the bloom to her nose. Her eyes closed shut as she inhaled the fragrance. When she opened her eyes, she was back to her own jolly self, with a twinkle in her eyes, she said, "we must go to the nursery soon and get Little White Pet to plant on the grave". So much a rose can do to a person.

Today, she agreed that she probably had taken a cutting from a runner or suckering rootstock instead of the real mother plant. We did went to the nursery and bought the real Paul Himalayan Musk for my garden and Little White Pet for her husband's grave. We are still not sure what kind of root stock she had the 2 inches cuttings taken from, but the blooms are very similar Innermis Morletti.

The guessing game continues because there are also similarities to another damask rose cutting she had given me long time ago taken from Cyprus.


The fun of collecting old roses continues....