It was definitely love at first sight!
In the first moment that I saw her, Rosa ‘Francois Juranville’ shot a rose-thorned arrow through my heart, capturing both it and my imagination completely. Eight years of careful observation and appreciative encounters have done nothing to diminish that. What a pleasant and unexpected surprise.
As with most affairs of the heart, a crush may seem awesome at first blush, but true love takes time. One may need, after all, to see the object of one’s affection at a quarter past midnight in order to begin to truly understand its deeper nature. Doesn’t this botanic creature look marvelous within the cool/warm mix of porch light and moonlight? (Be sure to click on the image to see it larger.)
One may also need to see one’s new ‘crush’ caged in by life’s circumstances, before really knowing whether it is merely a fair-weather rose or instead, a generous magician and true font of beauty.
When life’s inevitable rain squalls descend, no rose so finely featured could ever hope to disguise its true stamina and character. Gratefully, this one doesn’t need to.
Without question, some roses, just like some people are fussy and demanding, prone to pouting and never quite up to the stresses and struggles of the day at hand. Certainly, one may think it is love in that heady, first moment of meeting, but time often proves just how different initial appearances may seem from the true character of things which cannot help but reveal themselves over time.
When you think about the roses in your own garden and the people in your life, don’t some of them, a few perhaps, consistently enrich your world and prove themselves magical, again and again? If you’re lucky, the keepers will continue to enlarge your view of them even as you see them in stormy days and weighed down with bouts of sickness and hardship. Crushes inevitably fade, but true love grows, especially when both give generously, proving themselves worthy of another’s best affections.
…lessons gleaned and refined from time in the garden. Namasté.
