Roses: the obsession that has no cure.

It's the weather. The roses are on fire, breaking out everywhere. Pick them madly, I always told the children who were hesitant, as if cutting off such perfection in nature were vandalism. For every rose you put in a vase, or of whose petals you scatter on the grass, I told them, two more will flower. Or four. Or six. Yes, counter-intuitive. Since she was tall enough to reach the blooms Alex spent untold languid summer afternoons launching with five ever-growing fingers rose petals around the garden or on peoples’ heads.

This year I spent winter finding sites in the garden for roses where they didn't exist (sites not roses) making instant rationalisations for suitability, even though they may not have been. The winter bare-rooted rose type is surely the greatest bargain in the plant world; a nascent creation that should last a lifetime, stretching itself languorously upward against a wall, peering across a fence, or peeping around a corner of a house while issuing impossibly beautiful summer-long psychedelic  colours accentuating life, joy, existence, everything. 

There are failures in planting but not many, and most the fault of the planter; the success ratio makes putting roses in the ground an inexpensive gamble - as long as you like getting scratched to bits when pruning time comes around. I don’t wear gloves. 

The weather here has changed from the cold wet springs of recent years - that Spanish-named weather phenomenon whatever it is called - to the sun-drenched days of yore and night showers and fresh winds. Several miles up Sydney Road, set behind the warehouses and wreckers’ yards that line the highway exits of every major city in the world, a plant nursery is almost completely obscured by a drive-through burger place. The nursery, enigmatically but somewhat alluringly entitled Hello Hello, is a meandering museum of seemingly every plant in the world, a teeming hissing jungle under shade cloth and overhead watering sprays intersected with wet pathways winding back into an impenetrable canopy of palm fronds and mist. The roses are at the front of course, out in the naive morning sunlight that doesn’t understand orchid lore. Bare-rooted roses were $12 in winter or if you left it too late, roses in pots were $26.

This year, another rambling Albertine, this in a better spot than the one I already have; Esmeralda which is already enjoying life facing western sun for five hours a day; yet another workaday Lorraine Lee that will flower year-round in its flop-eared, don’t care manner; Dublin Bay, a let’s-see confidence trick facing morning sun at the east end corner of a shed and which, if it reaches around and climbs enough will also gorge itself on some gold afternoon light; and Blossomtime, a presumptuously-named climber against a section of cyclone fencing in the deep back corner where the block drops away into a hidden sun-filled dell.