Roses

I love roses.

I love their shapes, their colors, their names, but most of all I love their fragrance.  A rose without fragrance is akin to a day without dessert.  It can be done, but WHY?  For decades roses have been bred to have the long stems, repeat blooms, perfect bud shapes that didn't open too much, and fanciful colors, but these "improvements" often came at the cost of their fragrance.  Long-stemmed beauty roses.  Hothouse roses.  Florists roses.  All beautiful, but most lacking the one thing that, to me, defines a rose as A ROSE - that wonderful rose, or tea, or spicy fragrance.  Another feature that was lost was their toughness and disease resistance.  They became fragile, rather ugly shrubs that only looked good when in bloom and were susceptible to disease.  Thankfully, there was a resurgence of antique roses, many of which bloomed only once a year, and then rose breeders started crossing them with modern roses with the result being roses that bloomed repeatedly yet looked like antiques, were tougher and more disease-resistant and, most importantly, SMELLED LIKE ROSES.  Heaven in a garden!

Maggie

Maggie

I grow roses.  Not in a special bed reserved just for them, no no.  They're sprinkled all over throughout my front and back gardens.  Antiques and hybrids, but not the florist roses (hybrid teas).  I have no use for plants that only look good when in bloom.  I want workhorse plants that look good even when not in bloom, and for that, you need antiques (or their hybrids). 

Maggie, shown here, smells out of this world.  I was working in the yard today doing fall cleanup and pruning these and some of my other roses back pretty hard since they were very overgrown, but a few Maggies were still in bloom, and the yard smelled heavenly.  You don't get THAT with fussy hybrid teas.  

Now not all the roses in my garden smell good, but those that don't still serve as workhorses, such as these, The Fairy.  They're great landscape roses and once again, they look good even when not covered in blooms.  And who wouldn't love to have one or two fairies in their garden?

The Fairy

 And this brings me to today's card.  It is one I made earlier this year and I believe is the first card I ever made that followed a sketch.  It was also the first time I made paper roses.

The CS is Pool Party, and the dp is MME Miss Caroline by Howdy Doody.  The sketch was MOJO Monday, and I didn't feel that I had room for the little banner.  I was excited that I had discovered sketches and didn't care that I didn't follow it exactly!

The image, Flourishes April Showers, was colored with watercolor pencils on watercolor paper and chalked while still inside the Dienamics Oval Stax die.  (My coloring efforts were still in the beginner stage).

The little scrap of music is from one of my old music books from which I first learned to play piano over 40 years ago - truly vintage!  A seam binding bow and some pearls finished things off.

Thank you for sharing my roses with me.  No challenges today, just a pretty card with roses galore.

I love roses.  Don't you?

Happy Crafting!!