Art Heals: Roses

The tulips are gone.  Decapitated by wind and rain and time.  They were my favorites, sculptural in form, painterly in hue. 

So many things that were, are no more right now.  I must find substitutes.  So, roses.

While I was never promised a rose garden, I am finding one now—bushes in front gardens, in parks, even in empty lots.

Their forms are a bit too amorphous for my taste, no sharp edges. Their colors seem muted and pastel, even the reds don’t set me on fire. 

But with time on my hands and a hunger for visual pleasure, I am learning to appreciate them.  I find they have a lot to teach me, especially in the time of corona.

In the flower world, roses are revered elders, having existed over 35 million years (tulips mere infants at 1,000 years.)  You can’t exist that long without learning to change with circumstances (as I am discovering as I contemplate upcoming birthdays).  Over those eons, wild roses evolved and adapted to survive in changing environments, unto the present day.  As time went by, people in their ever over-arching desire to manipulate, change, and have it their way, cultivated modern roses, finessing variations in color, form, and frequency of bloom.  (This being the horticultural version of brunettes transmogrifying into blondes, who seem to be worth more, in the hair-care version of the Chelsea Flower Show.)

But cultivated roses, like cultivated people (refined, educated, discerning, enlightened) actually offer us much to be grateful for.  Their good breeding has resulted in disease resistance, something scientists are certainly trying to cultivate in people these days.

And one more thing.  If you like apples, or plums (and I do), you like roses.  It seems these have been recategorized as sub-families in the rose ménage. 

So, until next year, when my tulips return, I’m with Robert Frost, who wrote:

The rose is a rose

Was always a rose.

But the theory now goes

That the apple’s a rose

And the pear is and so’s

The plum, I suppose.

The dear only knows

What will next prove a rose.

You, of course, are a rose—

But were always a rose.

Here is a delicate one by Amr Mounib, dressed all in white.  Art Heals.