THE ROSE PARADE, AND QUESTIONS ARE NOT ANSWERS

'MR. LIPTON' ROSE...

...BLOOM

'DOUBLE KNOCKOUT' ROSE

...FLOWER

R. SETIGERA NATIVE ROSE

Wednesday, 7:30 AM.  53 degrees F, wind NW, calm at present.  The humidity is 70%.  The sky holds a few errant clouds and the usual haze inhabits the eastern horizon.  The barometer, trending down, predicts partly cloudy skies.  It is another fine morning.
    This has been a great spring for most flowers, and roses are no exception.  All my roses, mostly shrub roses and admittedly nothing fancy, came through the winter well, in spite of the oddly warm couple of weeks in March.  Now they are next to incredible in bloom, a veritable parade of roses.  It is difficult to say how the rest of the year will treat them but so far, so good.  One of the things I appreciate about roses is that no matter how highly hybridized they may be, the essential qualities of the genus remain obvious; range of color of bloom, appearance of fruit (hips), fragrance (to a degree)), appearance of leaves, shape, etc. are all recognizable as being 'rose'.  As the poet said, “a rose is a rose is a rose, is a rose…”  In the past I often shied away from roses as being too much trouble, requiring too much spraying and babying and I still feel that way about Hybrid Tea roses and some other fancy forms.  But so much has been done to improve shrub roses that they are little more trouble than any other ornamental plant and much more rewarding than many.
    I have a few modern varieties such as the Double Knockout, which is hardy and tough and floriferous; a very nice white shrub rose, Mr. Lipton; a native rose, R. setigera, the yellow Harrison’s rose, and a number of roses that that are unnamed, as I acquired them, maybe rescued some, here and there.
    Shimon Perez, 89 years old and a former Israeli prime minister, is in the US to receive the Medal of Freedom.  Talking about the middle east yesterday, he lamented that everyone had questions, but that, “Questions are not answers.”  Unfortunately, the same can be said about all our problems the world over.  It is easy to ask questions, sometimes pointed, often damning.  Providing answers is the difficult part of the equation.