Some Perfect Roses (2 of 2)

From “Rose Family (Rosaceae)” in Look at a Flower  by Anne Ophelia Dowden:

“This large family is found in all parts of the world, but especially in the northern temperate regions. It varies so much that some botanists think it should be split up into several
families.

“Roses are probably the best known and best loved of all garden flowers. But, though they have given their name to the family, they form only a very small part of it. Much more important to man are the fruit-bearing trees: apple, pear, cherry, plum, peach; and the berry-covered vines: strawberry, black-berry, raspberry. Almond fruits look much like apricots, but their seed is the nut we eat. Rose fruits (hips) are edible and were used in England during World War II as a valuable source of vitamin C.

“Medicines are derived from a number of the plants in this family: almond, wild-cherry, peach, blackberry. The leaves of burnet are a delicate addition to salads. And the wood of some trees — cherry, apple — is valuable for furniture and engraving.

“Our gardens and countrysides are full of beautiful members of the family…”

From “The Round” by Stanley Kunitz in Heart of the Flower: Poems for the Sensuous Gardener by Sondra Zeidenstein:

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees…

this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me….

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring a variety of early summer roses from Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens. The first post is Some Perfect Roses (1 of 2). For the photos in this post, I zoomed in for a close look at some of the details of individual flowers, filling the frames with rose petals and buds.

I was recently amused to learn that what we call rose “thorns” are technically not thorns at all, but the botanically correct term is “prickles” — because there is a scientific difference between thorns, spines, and prickles, described in some detail in the article How Did a Rose Get Its Prickles? Well, maybe so, but rewriting the famous Poison song to Every Rose Has Its Prickles doesn’t quite work, does it?

🙂

Thanks for taking a look!

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