With the rose festival coming up it felt appropriate to close our week of flowery distraction with photographs of roses.

It doesn’t hurt either that Fauré’s song about those Persian roses makes your heart melt, and let’s you forget the stings of whatever thorns are present in your life right now.

 

 

I will not bring up our President’s decision to leave the Paris climate accord; nor will I mention the ethics waivers to his near and dear.

I will point instead to the wide diversity among rose species (all 100 of them) and how none of their differences makes anyone of them more or less beautiful. Rose fossils are dated to 35 million years old and for a gram of rose oil you need 2000 flowers. 80% of land in Zambia and 54% of land in Ecuador is cultivated with roses (yet Holland is the largest exporter, hm.)

The world’s largest rosebush is of the Lady Banksia variety. The rosebush’s canopy measures 8,500 square feet (around 790 square meters), its trunk has a circumference of around 12 feet (3.6 metres), and it comprises of over 200,000 blooms. Oldest rose on record seems to be the 1000 year-one covering the nave of a church in Hildesheim, Germany. (Photographed by your’s truly in 2015 but somehow hiding in the archives….)

 

 

The most expensive rose, Juliet, (not shown) was introduced by David Austin in 2006. It took 15 years and £3 million (about $5 million) to breed. It is the world’s most expensive rose cultivar. Distracted yet?

So, visit the rose garden this week, before the festival hordes descend. Smell the roses  – and then think about what you can do to keep this planet in shape to grow them for generations to come…..