Showing posts with label roses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label roses. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

HERE COMES SUMMER..with its sights, scents, and sounds!

In June, I patiently search for the first signs of summer.

Listen closely, and you can hear the birdsong at sunrise. It’s the doves at our house who start the calliope of song if we leave our bedroom windows open. The nosy robins are back, nesting under our deck and in the rhododendron. Their first fledglings have already been booted out of the nest and intermittently (and annoyingly) squawk, calling for a parent. The brazen sparrows have also returned and have kicked the bluebirds out of their nesting box. Only one lone hummingbird visits our feeder.

Rain in June is a silver spoon as the old adage goes. It’s the month when vegetation emerges and gardens in the North are planted which will yield bountiful crops throughout the next four months and into fall. This year, my bucket garden has been watered quite often by the gray clouds hovering in the sky. I decided to change it up a bit. I’m growing some herbs: lemon thyme, rosemary, oregano, and parsley. Every year I grow a plant of basil on the patio.

The flower of June is the rose which is my favorite because of its soft, layered petals and delicate scent.

I was lucky to be born on a scorching, 90+ degree, June day—the last one of the month—right in the middle of haying season, as my Dad used to point out with a slight grumble in his voice.

When June arrives, farmers push hard during the sweltering sunny days to get a hay field cut, dried, and baled. The sweet and intoxicating scent of newly mowed grass fills the air and forces everyone near to pause and enjoy it, even if the work of cutting, baling, and storing it is hot, intense, and tiresome.

Do you have favorite sights, scents, and sounds of summer?

As poet James Russell Lowell so aptly writes about the month:

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays: 
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten…

                                    ~ James Russell Lowell – 1819-1891

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Monday, June 3, 2019

"Rain in June is a silver spoon."


There is an old farmer’s saying, “Rain in June is a silver spoon,” and “A good rain in June sets all in tune.” This year, I think we all can easily say that the rains are welcome to stop for a little while and let the earth dry.
 
I’m going to be honest. June is one of my favorite months of the year. It’s my birthday month, but it ushers in the beginning of summer and warmer, sun-drenched days ahead.

Across our Central Pennsylvania landscape, the grass in the fields is lush and taller than knee-high. Fluffy clouds in a baby blue sky scud along on the breeze, and the air holds the sweet mingled scents of many different blossoms. One of my favorite flowers is the rose, which is also the flower of June.

I have tried to raise roses for many, many years. I’ve tried climbing, bush, miniature, tea, hybrid, knock-out—and the list goes on and on. What our friendly deer don’t eat, the remainder dies from the cold, freezing winters.

I have only a clump of old-fashioned rag roses left, which I dug out from around the foundation of an old house from the 1800s on our farm in Northeastern Pennsylvania. This hardy variety seems to be able to hold its own, despite the rabbits munching down the stalks under the snows.

If you have a favorite month of the year, please share it. If you have a favorite flower, please share that as well. 


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Sunday, June 25, 2017

JUNE - The Month of Roses

Although the rose has always been my favorite flower, it is also the flower of June, my birth month. Growing up on a farm in northeastern Pennsylvania, I cherished the intoxicating fragrance of the antique rose bushes growing around the stonewall foundations of old razed houses on our property where early settlers lived, but later moved westward for reasons unknown. Every June, like a birthday present from the earth and heaven above, it was a delight to see the many bushes, growing wild, bursting into riotous pink blossoms, and spreading over an entire knoll of our pasture.

Old roses, also called “old-fashioned roses,” “heirloom roses,” “antique roses” and “old garden roses” are those plants introduced in America prior to 1867. Although there are hundreds of old rose varieties, they are best known for their hardiness and fragrance.

The oldest rose planted today was in existence some 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. It migrated from Persia (Iran) through Turkey to France and finally into England Later, clippings of these old garden roses were often hand-carried to America by early immigrants from Europe.

In my novel, Four White Roses, I chose to have the heroine try to save the last white Austrian rose that the hero’s great-grandmother brought with her stateside just prior to World War I.

Sometimes writers don’t know where they get ideas for writing a novel. Sometimes thoughts and ideas just pop into our heads. To be honest, only when I started writing Four White Roses did mental sparks erupt—and I was able to draw an eerie connection to my own life. I have actually saved the last old roses bushes planted on my family farm and dating back to the 1800s.

Luckily, I took cuttings after my husband and I were married. With the passing of my parents, the rose bushes eventually died out, probably succumbing to harsh winters, the elements and wildlife, and lack of nourishment and care. Now, more than ever, I find it humbling when I realize I possess the very same roses planted by the hands of our first settlers. And, the lineage is still alive for over a hundred and fifty years.

Ralph Waldo Emerson best reflects my feelings about these beautiful flowers with those prickly thorns:
 “There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.”

BLURB:
 When widower Rich Redman returns to Pennsylvania with his young daughter to sell his deceased grandmother’s house, he discovers Grandmother Gertie’s final request was for him to find a missing relative and a stash of WWI jewels.

 
Torrie Larson, single mom, is trying to make her landscape center and flower arranging business succeed while attempting to save the lineage of a rare white rose brought from Austria in the 1900s.

 Together, the rich Texas lawyer and poor landscape owner team up to rescue the last rose and fulfill a dead woman’s wishes. But in their search to discover answers to the mysteries plaguing them, will Rich and Torrie also discover love in each other’s arms? Or will a meddling ghost, a pompous banker, and an elusive stray cat get in their way?