My husband and I recently visited David Austin Roses in Shropshire. It set me thinking about why I love roses: the scent, the sweet-shop colours and the silkiness of the petals. But they also have thorns and are beloved by insects such as earwigs. This links to my latest poetry collection, Earwig Country (Valley Press 2024), where the main theme is ‘beautiful things have inner horrors’.
We do have a small Tudor style rose garden within our back garden, with box hedges and some David Austen roses, and others that need a little work, pruning etc. We also have a few which were standard roses but have reverted to wild roses, and are far too large for this miniature parterre. So our visit was partly scoping out replacements. I liked the Olivia rose, and hope to order bare rooted in the correct season. I can’t see a rose without sniffing it for its scent, and will only buy scented ones. Everywhere I go I see roses and apply my nose to them, and have done since I was a small child. They are indeed ‘olfactory delights’ (quoting one of my own lines there).
My dad loved growing roses and so did my father in law. I thought I would share this poem from my earlier collection, in which my husband and I are sorting out his parents’ garden after we have had no choice but to move them into a retirement fla
t where we could keep a better eye on them. It’s from my 2016 collection The Five Petals of Elderflower.
Late Roses
All day we have been working,
side by side in your childhood garden,
lopping shrubs, eradicating brambles
snipping dead heads, yanking weeds.
October roses emerge in vibrant hues:
oranges, golds and crimsons, with thorns
which rip our clothes and flesh.
Their scent is a reward for labour.
Your parents’ tangled minds
are clogged with memories, resurfacing
as they approach their nineties.
We have assumed control.
Safe in their new apartment, they cling
to routine, repeat old stories, laugh,
are mostly thankful for our care: roses
late flowering against the dark of winter.
My very first collection, back in 1988, Dandelions for Mother’s Day, was prefaced by an epigraph from Emily Dickinson : ‘Essential oils are wrung/ the attar from the rose/ be not expressed by suns alone/ it is the gift of screws’, which I felt suited what I was aiming to do in my work, distill things down to essentials.
Roses have always been important to me and we are approaching rose time, which can go on right till frost comes.
Tell me in the comments, have you ever written about roses? Feel free to share you poem here.
Angela Topping 