Roses
Since my earliest childhood I have been a fan of roses. Be in that rose petals playfully represented a delightful dish to us children; be it that we were called upon to make a flower picture in primary school; that a dead bird needed a soft mattress in tis grave; tha a path needed to be strewn for others engaged in play; that a dungeon was needful behind a large rose bush; or that the exquisite scent enriched our lives.
The first rose that gascinated me throught and through was La France. The softness of its petals slightly rolled backwards, the pale silvery lustre of its pure pink, the slight fatigue of the full blossom whose perfect scent gave a feeling of safe summer-time happiness – thes hav lost nothing of their powerful impression after four decades.
When my cat Thetis died, a Greek national, nothing less than a rosebush would do for her grave, a rose that was a delicately pale pink as Thetis´ skin: Souvenir de la Malmaison. When I was engeged in rose research, my adventures with roses began in earnest. They simply seduced me. At present, a consicerable number of them is lording in our garden, and yet it gives me pain to see other roses in other peoples´s gardens or in books that by dint of their appearance awaken the wish to own them: that is surely what Don Giovanni must have felt … And what great to-do, what a lot of work, to meet a satisfy the needs of each and every one of them!
Irmi Horn