a rose is a rose is a rose
enthralledAFAIK, there is no rose named Gertrude Stein. This seems to me a great oversight.
However, there are a lot of other roses, and I hiked up to the Elizabeth Park rose garden and saw some today.
I did notice that while there were any number of bumblebees and hornets doing their pollinating thing, honeybees did seem awfully sparse. But I saw this one, working merrily away:
And also a dragonfly on the climbers....
One of the things I love about Elizabeth Park is that it has a lot of older roses, singles and doubles, which have an amazing amount of scent. The photos can't begin to capture my favorite thing about the garden, which is that as you walk through it, you find yourself walking through a mosaic of different, varied rose scents. And they are all different: some are sweet, some are pungent, some are almost acrid.
And some of the rose bushes have been there for what I would conservatively estimate as A Good Long Time.
Is this one red enough for you, 
commodorified?
I like the red ones best, of course, but there's other options--midnight blue, silver-white, one that's velvet-red on the inside and bone-white on the outside of each petal. And yellow, of course....
And variegated....
This one is a test rose: it doesn't yet have a name....
I didn't get a picture of one of my favorites, carefree delight, a sprawling pink shrub rose with tons of scent and tiny wild-rose style single blossoms.
But of course no serious rose garden could be complete without this plant, which I was lucky to catch at all: it was almost over, only a few blooms left on an eight-foot climber.
Sweet, ancient eglantine....
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight.
A Midsummer Night's Dream II.i
and the test rose is a cutie.
Come visit!
BTW, if nameless rose needs a name, can you suggest Gertrude? It seems an oversight on the part of the rose naming world in general that she doesn't have one.
Naming Roses
LOL. I think you could have a lot of fun . . .
The naming roses malarkey reminds me of the TV Show Jim'll Fix It which was a regular feature in the UK when I was a kid. Basically, kids wrote in with requests, eg meet Duran Duran, touch a snake, learn how to juggle etc and Jimmy Saville, a bonkers looking Radio DJ made their dream come true and gave them a Jim Fixed It For Me medal.
The reason for this glimpse into British cultural history is that famously (and I remember the episode)the actor Peter Cushing wrote a letter and ask Jim to fix it for him to have a rose named after his late wife Helen. Jim obliged and the whole episode, from the handwritten request, to Peter choosing a rose, was incredibly moving. And there is now a rose called Helen Cushing - although I couldn't find a picture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cushing#Death_of_his_wife
Somewhat of a digression, but maybe they have vacancies in the Deparment of Rose Namers? You should keep an eye out.
Re: Naming Roses
I had never heard of Jim'll Fix It, but it sounds liek a brilliant idea.
I know you can pay some breeders to develop roses for you--it's how Canterbury got a Christopher Marlowe rose....
Re: Naming Roses
But he does it so very prettily.
And yes, Jim fixed it for many a child. Notably for a group of boy scouts to eat their packed lunch whilst riding a rollercoaster.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wwPeSDCCAs
However, he never fixed it for me to meet Wonder Woman. *sigh*
The other one I loved by name, years before seeing it, was columbine.
And those pictures are gorgeous!
Eglantine is in many of the 19th century children's books I grew up on, but I never knew exactly what it was.
They pruned the rose bushes today at work, although prune is a bit of an understatement. They massacred them, cutting at least two feet of height off the top and making them into boxy bush-things. I don't know if they'll recover and it makes me sad, because when conditions were right--which they haven't been this year--they'd bloom all summer long.
The test rose reminds me of Joseph's Coat, which we see a lot around here.
"eglantine, eglantine, oh how you'll shine
your lot and my lot have got to combine"
Lovely Flowers
AND
Locus arrived and had a VERY NICE writeup for Water and Whiskey. CONGRATULATIONS.
Most Awesome!!
Smiles for Bear
Re: Lovely Flowers
It might help the roses if you compost them around the base, and pile snow over them once there is snow....
Clearly your next task is to learn how to breed roses, breed one and name it Gertrude Stein!
There's a Robbie Burns, but... It's white...
And while I'm researching rose gardens, I may as well read up on the Sacramento area in the 1970's, hermaphroditic disorders, alcoholism, child abuse and neglect, the Irish, painting techniques, cocaine addiction, Spanish-American culture, and Victorian architecture.
And study some color palettes and start reading up to find some epigraphs that I could maybe fit in. Oh! And maybe outline... *whees with excitement*
Or I could just write some more poems and focus on the collection instead--that's closer to fruition. :P
Because otherwise, Mistah Kurtz, He Fuxxed.
I guess I"m just excited from all the writing I got done and feeling like, y'know, an actual writer maybe? But, like I said, I'm getting so close to an actual collection of poems...I think I have at least thirty and the revisions continue! :D *bounces*
So I could have my very own War of the Roses going on every summer *g*
PS: As your blog is one of my favouritest places to lurk, I'm de-lurking myself now and adding you to my Friends list. I hope that's okay.
I'll try not to make myself too much of a nuisance.