I am quite the opposite of the rose garden fetishist; I believe in the easiest roses possible. Especially when you consider that my "soil" consists three or four inches of decayed granite on top of more or less solid rock on a hillside. So I make do with pots. And not those big, beautiful, pricey pots, either, but pots of a modest size.
Nor do I buy my roses at the nursery. No, I buy around Mother's Day or some other sentimental holiday at the local supermarket. You know, those little containers with miniature roses that make such thoughtful gifts that usually dry up to be thrown away. But put the plants in an eight or ten inch, three gallon pot and they'll grow into a modestly sized bush, rewarding you with flowers throughout the warm months.
They're not those big, lush roses that fanciers prefer but instead pretty little blossoms, like my yellow and pink above.
Another solution is an Arizona wild rose. Next my front landing, which is one flight up the hill, I've a lusty bush growing in the hillside soil quite happily; I just make sure it gets a bit more water than would happen naturally. It rewards me with simple 5-petaled pale pink flowers in late spring.
You do have to be careful, of course; wild roses specialize in nasty little thorns.
At this time of year, the wild roses are spent, leaving me with a fine crop of rose hips. There's only one slightly domesticated rose that might survive, possibly prosper on my land -- those wonderful yellow Henderson roses (below) brought to Prescott by the pioneers. They border the Sharlot Hall Museum grounds on Gurley Street and I've seen them here and there in town. Unfortunately, they multiply
only by sending out runners. No seeds or I could easily start a plant as I did the wild rose.
The nurseries do not carry these old fashioned favorites, as they are in demand only during that brief two or three week window when they bloom at Sharlot Hall. But they are survivors -- I recall two huge bushes along Iron Springs Road in Skull Valley that had been neglected for years, but they thrived. My kind of plant!
My wild Arizona rose was covered with its single pink blossoms early this summer; which led in due time to an equal number of fruit, called rose hips. Old fashioned folk made jelly and teas from rose hips; the herbally conscious make all manner of medicinal concoctions, from syrups to powders.
I promised my crop, once ripe, to Georgene to make into a syrup, chock-a-block full of vitamin C (rose hips beat citrus fruits on that count).
Not a bad haul from one plant, eh?
And here is the final product -- a honey and rose hip syrup. Quite yummy. If you also have a productive rose bush, here are some recipes.
Linkage: One doesn't expect to hear about floods in Jeddah; in fact, residents of the Arabian city are ill prepared for a major rainfall. Fortunately, Susie of Arabia was out with her camera to get pictures of this highly unexpected weather. This interesting woman, incidentally, was once a Prescottonian. Next -- a forthright discussion of the problem of dying aspen in the higher elevations around Flagstaff; it would seem that the immediate culprit is the huge increase in number of elk, caused, in turn by the lack of predators and the prevalence of water thanks to stock tanks.
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