One just has to love creatures so lavishly endowed. Summer's roses are glorious creatures in their time of blooming, be their flowering an interval lasting a few weeks or one lasting all season long. All artful curves and lush fragrance, velvety petals and fringed golden hearts, the blooms are lavishly dappled with dew at first light, and they're a rare treat for these old eyes as the early sun moves across them. If we are fortunate, there will be roses blooming in our garden until late autumn, and we three hold the thought close.
The word rose hails from the Old English rose, thence from the Latin rosa and the Greek rhoda. Predating these are the Aeolic wrodon and the Persian vrda-, and at the beginning of it all, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form wrdho- meaning "thorn or bramble". Most of our roses have thorns to reckon with, and none more so than this offering.
The exquisite David Austin rose (Heritage) is visible from our bedroom window, and seeing it first thing in the morning, we find ourselves falling in love with roses all over again. The blooms are particularly lovely as they mature, gracefully poignant as they fade and wither and dwindle, their petals tattering, falling away and fluttering to the earth like perfumed confetti.
Bumbles and their kindred love roses, and they spend their sunlight hours flying from one bloom to another, burrowing deep into the centers and kicking their pollen bedecked legs in rapture. The air is filled with their whirring wings and happy, buzzing musics.
There's a bittersweet and poignant aspect to one's thoughts in late June, and I remember feeling the same way last year around this time. Here we are again, pottering down the luscious golden slope to autumn and beyond.My pleasure in the season and a gentle melancholy seem to be all wrapped up together in falling rose petals and blissed out bumblebees.
I call it wabi sabi (侘寂) and embrace the feelings when they arise—they are elemental expressions of transience, impermanence and the suchness (tathata) of all things. How sweet this season is, roses, thorns, bumbles and all.
2 comments:
How lovely. We have two rose bushes that burst out with red roses earlier, then all of them faded, leaving a bush full of rose hips. I guess nobody wanted teas. So eventually I got on my leather gardening gloves and my clippers...and whacked away the dead parts. Three days later we can see the new growth and buds. Some plants just need to be "dead-headed."
Roses here are like versions. Never last very long.
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