Wet Roses
Yesterday was a BEAUTIFUL day—one of those spring days you get sometimes in what is still untrustworthily deep winter and you have to say harshly to yourself it’s February. Don’t get carried away. It’s FEBRUARY. It was a beautiful day for gardening . . . and I was mostly* tied up in FRELLING BELL ADMIN MEETINGS** . . . which just would have got scheduled for what turned out to be February’s delusive spring Saturday.
Today it’s been sheeting down all day . . . and after Sunday service ring*** I was out in the garden at the cottage planting roses. In the rain. At the old house where we spent a major portion of our time in the garden every frelling day† rain, shine, or alien invasion, I did a lot of gardening in the rain††, but that was when we had two and a half acres.††† But these poor roses . . . they’re carry-overs from last year and I’d forgotten about them entirely when they arrived unheralded in the post a . . . er . . . few weeks ago. Er. They arrived during one of our really extreme seizures of winter and the posting bag even says that if due to inclement weather you can’t get them into the ground right away leave them shut up in the bag for up to . . . well, quite a while. Er. And I did. Leave them in the bag, that is, for quite a while. When I finally remembered them again I did the inarticulate-cries-of-dismay thing, tore them out of the bag, ascertained that against the odds they were still alive and, because I didn’t have time to plant roses then, slapped them into one of my big rubber half-barrel containers with half a (large) bag of compost to reassure them and . . . well, that was a while ago too. And every time I’d go out into the garden I would say to myself, I really have to figure out where I’m going to plant those roses. Here? Third House? Pot? Ground? With what friends? And I’d put off deciding, because I’m always in a hurry and I want to think about it.
The other salient fact about all this is that when I hauled them out of their dungeon cell and put them in the oversized bucket we hadn’t had any rain for a while, and I was having to water everything in pots which is very annoying in January when there aren’t any flowers to spur you on‡, not to mention freezing your butt off and getting chilblains on your hands, and because of course I was going to plant them shortly it didn’t matter that the oversized rubber bucket didn’t have any drainage holes, and what was important was that it was the biggest container I had empty, so I could put all three of them in it.‡‡
And then it started raining. Barring yesterday it’s been raining kind of a lot. And I was looking at them swimming yesterday‡‡‡ and thinking the Rose Rescue Society is going to be after me, I have got to get them planted. Or at least out of that bucket. So today . . . I planted them. In three flower-pots which are too small. Sigh. But it was raining. It was in fact pelting down.§ These pots were what was available and easy both to fill up and to move. And the next time I’ll plant them properly! I promise! No, really!
. . . And then, because I am insane, I took my sodden gardening sweatshirt off, put my raincoat back on§§ and went out to support our local snowdrop garden which had the bad luck to be open today. They had a plant stand. What did they want to go and have a plant stand for? So I bought two clematis and one of those little fiery-red dogwoods which in my defense I’ve wanted for a long time. . . .
* * *
* ‘Mostly’ being relative. Which in my case is to say all non-PEG and non-hellhound time. I didn’t even sing yesterday. Arrrgh. First voice lesson tomorrow. I feel like a little kid the day before first grade starts. Remember when you were excited about school? When it was all a Daring Adventure? And you couldn’t decide whether to be scared or thrilled? And you weren’t sure what you were getting into? And what if the teacher didn’t like you?^ And what if you were too stupid to do . . . whatever? Eeeeep.
^ I dunno about the rest of you, but the possibility that I wouldn’t like the teacher didn’t start occurring to me till much later. When I was little, if I didn’t like the teacher it was my fault. She (in my era all primary school teachers were she) was the teacher, wasn’t she?
** Well, someone has to go.^ Sigh. And it does bestow upon one a faint comforting gloss of moral superiority. Not comforting enough. Or possibly not superior enough.
^ I wanted my knitting. Oh, how I wanted my knitting. And I didn’t have it. And the reason I didn’t have it? No, not because I bottled out. Because I had a Dalek at the foot of the stairs moment when I went to bundle the current skein and my knitting needles into my knapsack . . . and realised there was no way to do this because the working yarn was threaded through the little hole in the knitting bag. You remember the clever little working-yarn hole in the knitting bag, which is why I bought the thing? Yes. So . . . I could unravel the first four rows of square #3, not to be thought of, or I could feed a lot of yarn through the hole, cut it off and then wind it up. No. And no, I was not going to schlep the whole bag to the meeting. So I had no knitting. Anguish. This being one of the REASONS TO LEARN TO KNIT. However at least I now know that I do want my knitting+ and can plan in advance. Which in this instance means I’m going to try to get off to my FIRST VOICE LESSON WITH MY NEW TEACHER tomorrow early enough to . . . stop at the yarn shop++ and buy a second set of 6mm needles. To have them to stick through another skein of mobile yarn.
+ Even though I would have been the only knitting person there. Hey, I can start a trend.
++ Uh-oh
*** Not bad, thank you for asking. Although I was hideously conscious of being jerked back from Sunday morning la-la-la-la land by where I passed the treble during a touch of bob minor: oh . . . oh . . . that’s where I am. Arrgh. I also survived a touch of Stedman doubles but I was unaffected by the calls—which means I could just keep grinding away at the basic pattern, although everybody else was shifting around, which is disconcerting on a Sunday morning—and I was so distracted by the intensity of my prayer to the bell gods: please don’t call me into an evil coathanger single, please don’t call me into an evil coathanger single, that I nearly went off the rails anyway. But I didn’t. And nobody else has to know. Except you, of course. Niall said afterward, that was pretty good, wasn’t it? Yes, it was, I said, not meeting his eyes.
† Well, Peter did. I’ve always been more of a fair-weather gardener than he is, but I’m nowhere near as much a fair-weather gardener as he thinks I am. Because he used to be out there in blizzards and hailstorms doesn’t say I’m a slacker, it says that he’s a fruit loop.
†† I’ve told you about Peter’s ‘it’s not wet rain’, yes? My own feeling about gardening in the rain tends to be that if I get out there and stuck into something before the heavens open, I’ll probably stay out. If it’s already teeming down muskrats and giraffes, I’ll probably stay indoors and dust the bookshelves^ or something. Today was an exception.
^ HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
††† And I wasn’t taking forty-seven kinds of music lessons and being outmanoeuvred into deputy ringing masterships, organising quarter peals, etc.^ The whippets also took less dedicated hurtling than the hellhounds do because the whippets had a big lawn to streak over and flowerbeds to jink around.
^ Knitting doesn’t count. It’s (mostly) for those little bits of time and brainlessness when the only alternative would be . . . dusting bookshelves.+
+ Funny. I’ve had no problem avoiding dusting bookshelves the last fifty-eight years. Despite my lack of knitting skills.
‡ Except for my gallant little witchhazel, and the odd primrose. I have snowdrops everywhere now, more primulas, and my winter-flowering jasmine, having had a nasty shock last month, pulled itself together and is flowering again. Don’t know about the daphne odora. It’s huge, it’s not a particularly lovely object, and if I’m not even getting smelly flowers off it—in a good year it will make you think you’ve walked into Woolworth’s perfume section when you open the kitchen door—I’m thinking its days may be numbered. I could get at least three roses in the space it takes up. . . . Maybe five.
‡‡ With this winter’s indoor-forced hyacinths. They are gloriously tough little beggars, hyacinths, with the result that in a few more years both the cottage and Third House’s gardens are going to be given over to a forest of ex-indoor hyacinths. I like indoor hyacinths possibly a little too much. A bright pink or blue thing that smells like spring is very welcome in midwinter.
‡‡‡ Making faint little gasping noises
§ In terms of how hard gardening is on your back: the back of my sweatshirt was soaked through. The front had a little dirt on it but was completely dry.
§§ The hellhounds looked at me, shuddered, and said, You have got to be kidding
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