In my hometown of Buffalo the running story was always Weather with a capital W. But it seems everywhere on the planet this spring, Weather has been a major part of each story riveting our attention. We started 2011 with an exceptionally high number of major snowstorms here and lethal floods in Australia. Then came earthquakes, and the devastating tsunami in Japan. Back in the states, we’ve continued to have more than our share of natural calamities: major flooding in the south and northwest, unprecedented clusters of huge tornadoes, droughts and wildfires in the southeast. There’s been Weather here in my neighborhood of Prospect Heights in Brooklyn too. Last fall we had tornadoes that felled, snapped and splintered hundred–year old trees as though they were pencils. A brutal winter followed and after that a long, cold spring—the space heater was going through the third week of May. Then all of a sudden the landscape of my neighborhood transformed: within a couple weeks it was high summer. By high summer, I mean roses.
Yo! Bees are here too!
Kiftsgate Climber
Growing up with roses
Roses on my block can grab you
Growing up with a mother who fussed over her roses (and her neighbors’ roses), the roses on my block seem to fit the description of this New York borough’s stereotype: tough, scrappy, sometimes in your face: they’re survivors. While my mother pampered her beauties with special soil mix, food and proper light, pruning them to prevent a moist setting for fungus, painstakingly hand-picking aphids, these Brooklyn roses seem to dare you to mess with them. I’ve seen them still in bloom at Christmastime. I’ve seen them climbing two stories up the middle of a pine tree blooming yards of blood red cascades all the way. In some insane brutality, someone chopped that amazing climber down, but I noticed it’s come back this year and is already shoulder-high.
Though they seem to be tough specimens, I know there are gardeners somewhere behind these masterpieces, at least when they were chosen and planted back who-knows-when. I feel very lucky to live among these folks who share their effort, or luck, with me daily, and with the hundreds of other people who stream to and from the subway at the end of my block. And I don’t mean to say that my block is unique to the neighborhood. There are so many gardeners here, it can make your head spin or stop you in your tracks. Literally. People sometimes get snagged by wandering canes falling across the sidewalks. Sometimes, in a different way, you can be snagged too by a sudden fragrance, or the sight of an aurora formed by a low morning or setting sun illuminating translucent petals.
Brooklyn Botanic Gardens
Along the path in the rose garden
When I have an extra half hour before work, I walk to a different subway and wend through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden en-route. There, I get to watch the progress of the seasons and am in awe of the experienced, seemingly tireless, gardeners. Somehow they are able to prune and plant in ways that balance a careful design with an informality that makes it not only charming, but also seems natural, and in some places, even wild. The petals fall and are left as impressionistic scatter across the walkways.
A riot of roses
The Cranford Rose Garden is one of the BBG centerpieces. Though I like having the garden to myself at less spectacular flowering times, the early June rose blooms bring a quite a lot of people, even at eight-thirty a.m. and I love to see others sharing my passion for this place. Photographers crouch under bushes, couples stroll, moms, dads, grandparents and nannies guide children along the bricked paths.
Serious gardeners take notes, and others are there simply to revel in the riot of flowers: there are so many–in beds, borders, or climbing on swagging chains above, each competing in scent, delicacy, showiness, pedigree or color. My favorite is a white climber named Kiftsgate, whose sweet-tangy scent reminds me of a wild rose that grew along the creek in the neighborhood where I grew up. Here it is in Brooklyn, but it takes me back there too.
Yo! We’re roses! We’re here
Rose Riot
The Cranford Rose Garden from above
Now with a weeklong heat wave of weather just passed, at times pushing almost 100 degrees, the first ecstatic bloom of roses here has mostly ended. Though they’re looking somewhat dispirited, I know those Brooklyn hardies will come back, and continue in their consecutive, more measured blooms, many through the fall into early winter. We’ll see how the weather goes. They are so fragile and poetic, yet thriving after all that harsh Weather, and you can imagine them saying, “Yo! We’re roses! We’re here. We’re staying. Ya gotta problem with that?”
Susan lives in Brooklyn where she writes, paints and continues to try to play fiddle. After a long career at Newsweek Magazine, her current day job is working as reference librarian at Sports Illustrated.
Yo! What a nice evocative piece about one of the beauties of summer.
I had the joyful opportunity to visit the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens 5 years ago when my honey and I lived in Rumson, NJ. Dale Chihuly had an exhibit there I wanted to see. The Chihuly glass was fantastic, but I enjoyed the rose garden almost as much!
Wonderful installment! We live in Cobble Hill (my longtime most-beloved swath of Brooklyn, from Atlantic going south to Red Hook), and the sites you mention are among my fondest. It has been a truly lovely season here… a leisurely, gentle spring whose coolness kept tree blossoms alive far longer than in previous heat-laden Mays. And summer, despite last week’s heat wave, seems to be coming upon us in a more or less reasonable fashion. My own recent forays have included a mushroom hunt with the NY Micological Society, in our gloriously diverse Prospect Park, and, further upstate, outside New Paltz, an herb forage on a an organic educational farm. Long live the green season, 2011!
The whole garden was always a treat – but the roses commanded a trek to Brooklyn from Manhattan each year that I lived there (25 years).
There are no botanical gardens in the Northwoods – but many small towns have prairie and butterfly garden displays, and annual private garden tours are a must see.
Urban nature has an Attitude! Spot on personification, and wonderful pics capturing the bounteous floral treats we New Yorkers are lucky enough to have in our “backyards”.
Rose bushes never disappoint me. I would love to visit the rosegarden in Brroklyn, but can’t wait till the Buffalo Garden walk and getting my new coral drift roses.!