Pink Pasture Roses

Pink Pasture Roses

My pink pasture roses are enthusiastically blooming. They are an old-fashioned native rose, brilliant pink but “single”, meaning they have only one row of petals, five in total in that row. Their thorns, a mix of short, medium and long and all needle sharp, line their stems as numerous as salt grains on a pretzel, and I, typically gloveless in every situation, will don gloves when I cut a bouquet to put in the vase by my door. The scent of roses can be cloying and even heavy, but these roses smell light and fresh, like a clean June morning. Unhybrid and totally native, they are as tough as the clay they will grown in. This rose was in the yard when I moved in, and may have been here for decades; in my experience all those old roses were a tough bunch, disappearing under the lawnmower’s blade only to reappear the next year, or sprouting up in an untended yard where they had been long forgotten.

They fall apart rather quickly when cut, but I still do to enjoy them near me. Years ago I did a small quick daily sketch of a bunch of these and my red climbing roses