“roses 2007”by katecat is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Be honest: the roses one encounters in daily life are, mostly, hideous. Think of the colors: syphilitically inflamed orange, or highlighter-pen salmon, or nylon pink, or overripe-banana yellow. How often have you bent to smell a neighbor’s rose, ready to snort up a lungful of Turkish-delight deliciousness, only to discover no scent at all? The names, too — Newly Wed, Scentimental, Golden Smiles, Admiral Rodney, Bright ‘n’ Breezy — put breeders of pedigree dogs to shame. But worst of all is the plant itself: drab little leaves, plagued with leprous brown spots or grazing aphids; prickled shoots whipping in the wind above gnarled, charmless trunks. And no one knows how to prune them. Invariably either overdisciplined or scrubby, viciously trained into a municipal pygmy or as amateurishly hacked at as a young porcupine with a home haircut, the vast majority are tragic shadows of the perfect rose in its ruffled, scented bounty.
What’s more, they are dangerous. Which other common garden plant requires one to wear chainmail to perform the simplest tying-in, sharpened secateurs for ceaseless deadheading, a full hazmat outfit in which to spray it with the toxins required to keep it pretty? Haven’t you heard the stories of gardeners who, after a single rose-thorn puncture, lost an arm, or more? Would you keep a shark in your front yard? Precisely.
Charlotte Mendelson, “Let’s Ban Roses”, The New Yorker, 2017-06-21.
July 27, 2019
QotD: Ban roses!
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