I have a huge rose garden containing thousands of shrubs. It is a relic of twenty years ago when I owned a nursery specializing in unusual roses. Abandoned to nature, it is now a treasure trove of roses that survive or even thrive in complete neglect.
This year I'm looking for solace and distraction from my cancer treatment. I have this amazing overgrown garden to explore. Every time I am out there, I see something that makes me smile. Smiles are rare and precious to me right now.
My nursery is long gone but the rose garden persists. Sitting behind the greenhouses, it originally had more than 3000 shrubs - an archive of rare old garden roses, a compendium of miniature roses of the twentieth century, and the life work of my husband Paul's life as a rose breeder. Roughly a thousand shrubs survive.
I give thanks to the earlier version of me that lobbed this time capsule into the future.
I love beautiful derelict things.
Someday, a future landowner will find these feral roses and wonder how they got there. Perhaps they'll contact a rose archivist that will discover roses thought long extinct. That thought is certainly a demonstration that I still have optimism within me.
