Tending The Roses

Our backyard was small by Ridgewood standards. It was separated from the Willard School playground by a tall privet hedge, a 4 foot high wire fence and a gate which allowed us to come and go to school.

Inside the backyard was a small patch of grass for the boys to cut, a variety of annuals, perennials, and the roses. These roses were my Dad's domain completely and you didn't want to be around when he was spraying for bugs because the smell was awful.

One rose was given to us by an old friend and was forever known as the Cloukey Rose. It bloomed happily for many years in our backyard and when we moved to Hilton Head Island the Cloukey rose made the trip, too. It was later joined there by a dozen roses I purchased from the mail-order nursery Jackson and Perkins. My Dad continued to spray and trim all these roses just like in Ridgewood and, no surprise, they all thrived.

Then one day in late 1987 my Dad decided to buy a "Gentlemen's Farm" in Ashville, NC.
The plan was to keep the place in Hilton Head until they decided which one they liked better. This left the question of the roses and where the Cloukey rose in particular should reside. A quick decision was made and all the roses were uprooted and bundled up in the back of our Red Pickup truck for the move to what we called the "Branchwater Farm." If you surmised that the roses thrived at Branchwater Farm then you are correct.

Sadly, when we sold the farm 7 years later and re-settled on Hilton Head all the roses were left behind for the new owners, even the venerable Cloukey. I guess my Dad thought he was leaving them in good hands and with someone who would care and look after them like he had for so many years.

A quick trip back to the area the following year disabused him of this idea pretty quickly. All our old neighbor could say about the new owner was that he was a "horse person" and didn't care much about growing things. In addition to letting the roses die from lack of water, he had paid someone to chop down all the Christmas trees we had planted on one of the hillsides. These trees were just left where they lay for the longest time until he finally paid someone to clear them away.

The lesson learned by our family was that it takes quite a bit of effort to properly tend to roses and if you don't have the foresight to appreciate the beautiful flowers they will produce each year then you really have no business working in a garden at all.