Growing Roses is Easy, Sometimes All You Need is a Little Nudge

Recently, I was busy in our back yard planting the "Iceberg" floribunda, I went out my side gate and out of the corner of my eye, a flash of yellow drew me to our neighbors Forsythia. It was beginning to bloom. When we lived in Nashville, we had a neighbor who had the most beautiful Forsythia bushes. She had told me that most of these 4ft round bushes were from cuttings that she had literally just "stuck in the ground" and watered. I always knew that Spring was just around the corner when Mrs. Dodd's Forsythia's were in bloom.

In the Autumn of 1993, we moved to a small house on Leatherwood Drive in Nashville Tennessee. Christina, our daughter was 2 1/2, Tyler, our son, was only 8 months old. The house had a nice approach from the road and had some plantings in the landscaped beds that bordered the house. After a while we met some of the neighbors. One in particular was Lucille Dodd. She was a mess. In her eighties, she only left her house on Friday's to go to the beauty shop to have her hair "fixed" and then to the grocery store. She often enlisted me to drive her and we became fast friends. She had the most beautiful forsythia and peonies on the block. We had a large hydrangea and she would threaten to come over in the night and pinch off our blooms for fear they would outshine hers.

One afternoon we were sitting on the covered porch of her home and we were discussing flowers. Hedge roses were making their debut in our area and I mentioned to her that I wanted to try them. She asked why I didn't take care of the rose I already had. I was confused. We did not have a rose in our yard. When I gently corrected her, "she said you have been mowing over it every week since you bought the place." I was dumbfounded. We got up and moved to the fence, she pointed across the street to our house and told me where to look in the grass for the root ball. She was certain I would find it. I went over immediately and looked in the spot she had pointed out, and much to my surprise, found the stump.

I grabbed my garden tools and began to dig around it and work up the soil. I mixed up some Miracle Grow and watered liberally. Then we waited. And Watered. And Fed. Did I mention we waited? Then, there it was, a shoot, then a cane. It was a climber! And climb it did! And Bloom! Wow! It wasn't long before Ms. Dodd was threatening to come and chop it down for fear of upstaging her flowers. We believed the rose to be a Don Juan. This episode of my life taught me some valuable lessons:

1. Growing roses is not that difficult. With a little care and attention, anyone can grow beautiful roses.
2. Listen to grumpy old women.

Circumstances took us from Tennessee in the Spring of 2000. I have never forgotten Mrs. Dodd, (who went to be with the Lord shortly after we moved), nor have I forgotten our Leatherwood rose.