Sunday 15 October 2017

the promised rose garden

Just outside Oxford's Botanic Garden is an curiously designed permanently public garden, bounded by hedges and right by the main road into Oxford City Centre.  At one end, a sinister tunnel of copper beeches throw a gravel walk into deep shade. At the other end is the entry to the gardens. Inbetween there is a stretch of box-hedge maze containing flower beds, growing roses. Lots of roses.

Roses of Oxford Roses of Oxford Roses of Oxford
Roses of Oxford Roses of Oxford Roses of Oxford
Roses of Oxford Roses of Oxford Roses of Oxford

It's curiously retro space; gravel crunches underfoot, and the soil between the roses is weeded bare, in the old style. The smell of the box and the smell of the roses combines into a grandmotherly pleasantness, undercut by the tang of traffic fumes from the main road. Almost every month of the year, some roses are in flower. I've walked this maze in the snow, and knocked snow off fresh blossoms. The English Rose is resilient as well as ravishing.

At this time of year, the breath of autumn is on the flowers. Blooms are fading, wreathed in spider's webs, outer petals spotted by rain and the end of summer. The petals are streaked and stained like antique silks, and here and there sunk into rot, a cludgy mass of brown petals clinging damply to the growing rosehip.

Roses of Oxford Roses of Oxford Roses of Oxford

I am rather too fond of roses. I own too many for my tiny garden, and they're all the wrong varieties. I'm growing a shrub rose up a fence; tiny florists' roses have been set free from their decorative troughettes and left to ramble madly through the flower beds. Some grand prestige tea roses in fancy colours are roughing it among the alkanets and hellebores in the deep shade. One of them turned out to have variegated leaves, in shattered green shades; that one's buried in the dark under an overhang.

But still, year on year, they remain, defiantly my roses.

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