greenstorm | Garden Rhapsody, Pt II

My garden, twenty feet in the air and with no actual soil to speak of overlooking the parking lot of a low-rent apartment building, is currently the most beautiful place on Earth and quite probably beyond.

Abraham Darby is... there are no words for this. He's blooming pink with apricot and yellow washes at the base now, tons of blooms, and you can smell the scent clear across the balcony. He's leaning out the railing to show off to all the lesser beings below and sprawling this way too, and it's only the first year I've had him. He has minimal blackspot despite my persistent refusal to spray. He is the exact same colour as the sunrise this morning with each bloom slightly variable, with a button eye in the middle of some, and with the exact right arrangement to his multitude of petals. Abraham Darby, fer thosea yew thet don't get out much, is an Austin rose, a modern attempt to breed roses that have some of the look of old roses while keeping a hardy, bushlike form.

?Heritage is also blooming her pretty little head off, although I still don't know if this one is Brother Cad for sure. We'll see when he finally opens down the way but until then it does have some of the simplistic few-petals delicacy of Heritage. And doesn't have Brother Cadfael's scent, I don't think, so here's my best guess.

JFK has the most unimaginably beautiful flowers anywhere. Everyone needs this rose. Unfortunately my bush is crap, a clearance-sale thing, and I'm not going to let more than one bloom show on him this year because he needs to muster strength and grow canes. I have the unfortunate tendency to try to nurse things back to health which sometimes works but isn't the wisest with roses. Oh, well. The petals have the consistency of... wax? Really soft, really thick, amazing body to them. Incredible flower. Some nice scent. White! Buds come out green! What more could you want?

Love was an impulse buy last year the first time The Exotic went home and left me all alone. It's not really a greenstorm-type rose but it is really pretty in an enormous-flowers, bright-candy-pink-with-white-backing sort of way. The SO says he can see how it's called red. I have to admit that I haven't a clue. It's a deep pink, sure, but it's pink. It's a happy beautiful bush and also my oldest, probably some correlation there, and the flowers really are enormous and happy. Faint scent that keeps me checking for it like any behaviouralist study on random stimulation will show.

The New Yellow!!! And yes, I'm allowed to use exclamation marks like a schoolgirl. The phone rings. I roll out of bed, expecting to hear The Juggler telling me when he'll come visit. (The phone rings, as I type this. It's the Juggler telling me when he'll come visit) I roll out of bed and it's the SO's Mom. Greenstorm, she says, do you want a rosebush? I bought one for you, come down to the parking lot to pick it up.

So I now possess another rosebush, a yellow 'patio' rose of some kind or another. And, I need to motor through the shower.

And oh, ohohohoh! The Exotic may have met a girl. I hope it goes well. I hope it works. I'm so excited. I have weird twinges. He's at a BBQ with her. I love him. More later.