🌹 A Rose for the Garden 🌹

Despite what the title of this post might have led you to believe, I haven’t actually gotten any roses yet.

Mostly I’ve just been thinking a lot about them, and I learned that the market in town has a huge variety of roses that are for sale. Once we’re ready to begin working on the garden I fully intend to do and pick out a few! I certainly have quite the wishlist growing in my head.

I love roses, though I haven’t ever tried to grow any myself. I think they all just look so elegant and lovely. They make me think of versallies, of soft fairytales. A rose stands on its own merit if you, like me, are the kind of person that wants her garden to tell a story.

For example, I want my garden to embody the idea of a cozy fairytale. I want Beatrix Potter meets Wonderland meets The Secret Garden kind of vibes. We even have it in mind to get a small statue of the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, and Danny talked about painting it in glow-in-the-dark colors to make it look more like an organic piece. Like something that could actually be living in the garden.

I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I hope it does.

We also got a few small decorations for the garden when we went to hobbylobby recently, and once everything is ready to go they’re going to go out and add a little extra life around the vegetables and the flowers. Like, for example, I bought a little bird with a gardening hat and a flower, and I’m planning to affix her to a small birdhouse or something to make it look like that’s the house where she lives. That plan, though, is open to alteration because I can’t seem to find any bird houses that would accommodate how wide her feet are. Also, like, birdhouses deserve real birds living in them!

One of the roses I’m wanting to get is the Eden Climber rose. I mean, come on, just look at it! It’s so soft and delicate in its appearance and it’s absolutely something I could see in a Wonderland garden. Or something that Beatrix Potter would have growing along a stone wall.

I want to get an arch to put in front of the backyard gate that isn’t going to have the morning glories and have these grow up both sides of it to give the entrance to the garden a little extra beauty. I can definitely see it feeling like a portal to anyone walking from the outside of the backyard to the inside.

I also think I might pick up a Zephirine Drouhin or two. I like that they’re a deeper pink than the Eden Climbers, so I think it’ll add some nice contrast. Can you tell I like climbing roses?

I want to also get some soft pink rose bushes (non-climbing) and some yellow roses (also non-climbing) for the front yard in front of the porch. Right now we have an ancient rose bush there that is less rose bush and more just a Frankenstein’s monster of everything that had gotten planted around it and then was consumed by it. I think it’s just one big sucker at this point, but I don’t know for sure. It was planted long before we moved in and I’ve been wanting to get it taken out for a long time and replaced with something that’s actually pretty to look at.

Also I don’t think I need to say it but you know none of these pictures were mine, right? I found them on Pinterest and put them here because they illustrated what I wanted. I just wanted to put that out there in case anyone thought these were my roses—they’re definitely not, and given my novice gardening status, it’s going to take a lot of love and determination for my future roses to get anywhere near this pretty!

What are your favorite roses? Do you have any tips for growing them? Let me know!

Until next time!