Nature is wild, yo.
(Well–nature sometimes has some assistance being wild, given the poor job humans tend to do as stewards. The freakish weather patterns certainly aren’t helped by our burning the rainforest and boiling off our planet’s fresh water supply so lazy humans can use AI to do all the thinking and creating for them. We can really only blame ourselves when nature comes for us.)
Thanks to global warming and the polar vortex, our local weather has been growing stranger and hotter the past few years. It’s currently October 22, a date traditionally at risk of frost or snow in my part of the Midwest–and I have both lilacs and roses blooming, because it’s been so unseasonably warm that the plants think it must be next year’s growing season.
This particular rose is an amazingly hardy heirloom climbing rose that I propagated from cuttings of a plant at my last house. That house was built in the early 1940s, and the rose may have been close to the same age. It could be pruned aggressively and would still climb to the second-story deck within a few months, and it wasn’t uncommon for it to produce 300 blooms at once. The bright pink flowers smell amazing and flood the whole area with their scent. Many modern cultivars aren’t particularly fragrant, but these roses smell exactly like all those candles and lotions tell you roses are supposed to smell.
I really loved that climbing rose, and the prospect of leaving it behind actually made me reluctant to sell my old house, but once I got some cuttings to root, I was able to bring it with me to my new home. Now, after twelve years of free rein at my current house, the second-generation rose has established itself just as firmly as its predecessor. This year it climbed up two full stories and is currently trying to entangle itself with the power lines that connect to the house just under the second floor roofline (memo to self: prune rose before the power company has to get involved).
And now I’m on the eve of moving again, so I’m trying to propagate the rose with more cuttings, but these aren’t having great success. Only one or two of the dozen cuttings seem to be doing okay. (I think I may have missed the ideal time to take cuttings, but I didn’t know I was going to be buying a new house.)
But I’ll keep trying. After all, I can’t sell this house until I have a viable baby rose to take with me!