Rose Coloured Glasses

I have no hilarious tales concerning roses. I don't think I even have profound ones or mildly entertaining ones. I can tell you that for some reason, I find them difficult to photograph. Roses are perfection, and somehow that never quite seems to translate onto 'film' when I try and shoot them. I want to practice shooting roses, but somehow it would seem kinda selfish if I walked out of the grocery store with armloads of roses for myself. Now, before you get all high and mighty feminist on me, I have zero issue with a person buying flowers for themselves. When Safeway had BOGO tulips on one spring, you can bet your britches I had a dozen bouquets scattered about the house. I only had two vases at the time and had to stuff the tulips wherever they could fit, including the teapot, creamer, and sugar dish. No, we're penny pinching a little 'round here (it being the holidaze and all) and it's the season for giving, not for indulging on out-of-season flowers. Plus, my son is in the taste-test phase of his adventuring (which has included some fairly strange assaults on our Schnauzer), and I'm pretty sure any living thing that we bring into the house would end up in his mouth.



You'd think I'd have a funny story concerning roses since we do, after all, live in the wild rose province. People intentionally plant them here. In the Maritimes, they grow wild along the highway. We used to have them growing along the side of the house, but we didn't buy them. Nope. My folks went out with a shovel one afternoon and came back with a few bushes. Same went for the raspberry patch they had going in the back yard-- another highway transplant, so to speak. Come to think of it, I think a great many of the shrubs and whatnot in my parents' quite amazing garden had come from along the highway somewhere... the plants, and some of the more shapely rocks, which we got from a construction site that was on the way home from one of my summer jobs. My husband and I have talked about doing the same thing to the tangle of rose bushes planted outside the optometrist's office (midnight shovel raid!), but I reckon someone might notice, and I'm not up for tempting cowboy justice.



The shots you're seeing here today were taken from two locations. If you wander around to the back of the Parliament building in Victoria, you'll discover an English rose garden. If you get there early enough in the morning (after the sprinkler system has done its thing), you'll even get the requisite dew on the rose petals-- saves you from having to bring your own squirt bottle. The others were taken after the first snow here. There is a house down the street that has forsaken grass in favour of a jungle of roses. They aren't all that into pruning, so some of the bushes still have whole heads of roses still clinging for dear life, these dry, shriveled things among the red rose hips and the yellowish thorns-- thorns, by the way, of fairytale-esque proportions. I thought you might enjoy the juxtaposition of the lush, summery Victoria roses against the withered back-alley winter roses.