A Favorite Rose ~ Rosa "Gertrude Jekyll"

Rosa "Gertrude Jekyll"

Hurray for Pink Saturday http://howsweetthesound.typepad.com/

This is one of my very favorite Roses, I've planted her in the last two gardens I've had, and she NEVER fails to bring ooh's and ah's, especially as she's the first of my roses to bloom.  After a long dreary winter, a flowering Gertrude Jekyll is a wonderful sight, and her scent is divine (one of the rosiest smelling roses that I grow.)

Gertrude Jekyll was a gifted artist before she became a garden designer in the late 1800's and early 1900's, designing over 400 gardens, one of her most famous being her home at Munstead Wood. 

 I love what she shared about one of her favorite roses "Garland Rose" with another famous British garden dignitary Graham Thomas -

 "It is well worth getting up at 4.00 a.m. on a mid-june morning to see the tender loveliness of the newly opening buds." ( This because the faint blush of the buds turns white by mid morning.) 

I love her sentiments, it reminds me that there are true treasures right under our noses if we'll just take the time to look, even if it means rising a little earlier than usual now and again...

I'll close with this sweet poem about roses by George Eliot

You love the roses - so do I.  I wish

The sky would rain down roses, as they rain

From off the shaken bush.  Why will it not?

Then all the valley would be pink and white

And soft to tread on.  They would fall as light

As Feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be

Like sleeping and like waking, all at once!