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Nikolaus Leneau wrote, “Leafing through a book I found, / A pressed and faded rose, / And no longer knew whose hand / Had picked it for me once.”

I walked out to see how our front garden is faring these days, and I was surprised to see one of the miniature roses still in bloom, even though some of its petals are down on the ground. This was a plant that one of our friends gave us earlier this year. It has produced the most delicate blooms all summer long.

This little rose bush is planted in almost the same spot that two other miniature rose bushes were planted 14 years ago. When my father passed away, just a few days before my daughter was born, friends of the family had given my mother these miniature roses. She knew that she wasn’t going to stay in the family home after my father’s death and decided that our gardens were a much better home for these precious keepsakes. My wife and I honoured my father’s memory with these plants in the front of our garden, close to where our Rose of Sharon is now, and they rewarded us with beautiful summer blooms for quite a few years.

After one particularly harsh winter, both plants died. We are always careful to protect our roses, especially the ones that are out and away from the shelter of the house. Maybe they had simply exhausted themselves, producing bloom after bloom for so many years. We never planted another rose bush there until the one this year. Its most recent flowering is just about over and the plant has dropped most of its petals, but I still think we will have a few more buds before winter settles in.

Alice E. Allen in My Mother’s Garden, wrote: “Sweet as the breath of roses blown / The fragrance of her life.”

While preparing to write this blog, I sat with a coffee on the swinging bench we have outside just in front of our living room windows. I was paying close attention to the miniature, thinking it was going to be the focus for my writing today, when something else caught my attention.

Last year we planted a spectacular tea rose called ‘Stainless Steel’, right beside this small patio bench. There atop the tallest stem, is this magnificent bloom. It is completely open and beautifully fragrant. The phlox is still perfuming the air, but this tea rose is competing for my attention. It is not as fragrant as it would be on warmer days, but its scent seems to linger in the air above it. This one magnificent bloom reminds me to savor these precious lingering days of summer. It is one of the ‘Stragglers in the Garden’ I speak of in tonight’s radio program, between 9 and 11 pm, that I’m not ready to see go. Its color can best be described by its name, Stainless Steel. I’ve always appreciated roses that have unusual coloring. For years we grew roses with a salmon hue. Each bush has its own personality and signature fragrance.

Paul Verlaine  wrote, “Ah, when will they bloom again, the roses of September!”

Our roses are not the only flowers in bloom….

I’d like to share one of my favourite poems. It’s from Best Loved Poems of The American People selected and edited by Hazel Felleman, published in 1936 by Doubleday. This book is always in print and available to be ordered through your local bookseller. The poem is called ‘Said The Rose’ by George H. Miles.

“I am weary of the Garden / Said the Rose; / For the winter winds are sighing, / All my playmates round me dying, / And my leaves will soon be lying / ‘Neath the snows.

But I hear my Mistress coming, / Said the Rose; / She will take me to her chamber, / Where the honeysuckles clamber, / And I’ll bloom there all December / Spite the snows

Sweeter fell her lily finger / Than the bee! / Ah, how feebly I resisted, / Smoothed my thorns, and e’en assisted / As all blushing I was twisted / Off my tree.

And she fixed me in her bosom / Like a star; / And I flashed there all the morning, / Jasmin, honeysuckle, scorning, / Parasites forever fawning / That they are.

And when evening came she set me / In a vase / All of rare and radiant metal, / And I felt her red lips settle / On my leaves till each proud petal / Touched her face.

And I shone about her slumbers / Like a light; / And I said, instead of weeping, / In the garden vigil keeping, / Here I’ll watch my Mistress sleeping / Every night.

But when morning with its sunbeams / Softly shone, / In the mirror where she braided / Her brown hair I saw had jaded, / Old and colorless and faded, / I had grown.

Not a drop of dew was on me, / Never one; /  From my leaves no odors started, / All my perfume had departed, / I lay pale and broken-hearted / In the sun.

Still I said, her smile is better / Than the rain / Though my fragrance may forsake me, / To her bosom she will take me, / And with common kisses make me / Young again.

So she took me…gazed a second…/ Half a sigh…/ Then, alas, can hearts so harden? / Without ever asking pardon, / Threw me back into the garden, / There to die.

How the jealous garden gloried / In my fall! / How the honeysuckle chid me, / How the sneering jasmins bid me / Light the long gray grass that hid me / Like a pall.

There I lay beneath her window / In a swoon, / Till the earthworm o’er me trailing / Woke me just at twilight’s failing, / As the whip-poor-will was wailing / To the moon.

But I hear the storm-winds stirring / In their lair; / And I know they soon will lift me / In their giant arms and sift me / Into ashes as they drift me / Through the air.

So I pray them in their mercy / Just to take / From my heart of hearts, or near it, / The last living leaf, and bear it / To her feet, and bid her wear it / For my sake.”

If you have a passion for roses, I’d like to recommend the large coffee-table book, La Rose: An Intimacy of Roses , featuring the breathtakingly beautiful photography of True Redd. This book also contains poetry and prose. Some of the photos contain close-ups of petals and leaf, as well as almost every colour of rose being represented. It was published in 1990 by Western Eye Press in Telluride, Colorado. Its ISBN is 0-941283-07-0.

One final thought to consider as you read this and listen to my show tonight….

Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote,

“I believe flowers have souls. I have known roses that I expect to meet in Heaven.”

****

Don Jackson

“Autumn is truly what summer pretends to be: the best of all seasons. It is as glorious as summer is tedious; as subtle as summer is obvious; as refreshing as summer is wearying. Autumn seems like paradise” - Greg Easterbrook from The New York Times, and featured in the Points to Ponder column of the October 2002 Reader’s Digest.

There will come a point, sometime over the next month or so, when the colour change will be at its peak. The trees will be completely dressed in their autumn finery. The moment will be brief, though. If you’re not there to witness it, you’ll miss the moment. The leaves will drop either one by one, or in what has been described as ‘leaf-fall’. The latter is probably the most spectacular to see. It is as if by common consent, the leaves all drop at once. To be there, under the lofty branches, would be like being caught in a snowstorm of coloured leaves. The ground beneath the bare branches, as Castle Freeman Jr. wrote in a past edition of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, will resemble a Persian carpet underfoot.

To capture the moment just before the leaves begin drifting down on a gust of wind to the ground, or to be there to see this carpet laid out before you….

There are some who believe, like Greg Easterbrook, that autumn is paradise. To others, they might see the year growing dark and cold. Jesse Stuart saw it as a love song….

Tonight, late in my program, one of those books that has had a cherished place in my library for quite a few years now….The book is called Autumn Lovesong: A Celebration of Love’s Fulfillment by Jesse Stuart, published in 1971 by Hallmark Cards, Inc., in Kansas City, Missouri. Since it was published so long ago, its Standard Book Number is not as complex as an ISBN is today. It is 87529-210-0. Listen to what it said on the jacket cover:

“In Autumn Lovesong, Jesse Stuart fills the colors of all with the warmth of summer. Burnt-orange and burgundy. Pumpkin and tangerine. Umber and gold. They create an intimate mood, a settling down, a warm enclosure for love.

“He plays with autumn’s contrasting cold and warmth, wind and calm, soaring and falling, birth and dying. And finds in nature reflections of human love.

“Autumn Lovesong speaks softly. Its rhythms and sounds are as natural as breathing. As subtle as falling leaves. And its familiar images reach new dimensions of beauty and simplicity.”

In a past program I said there are voices all around us, a background that we seldom hear unless we are tuned in. These are the sounds that get covered up in the noise of traffic, construction, conversations, planes rushing overhead and trains passing by. All around us there is something that is always there, that speaks to us in an intimate way. So many have heard it through the ages….

“Sweet is the whispering music of yonder pine that sings.” - Theocritus from Idylls

“All along the river edges / Verdure’s turned to brown and gray, / Rustling through the dying sedges / Autumn’s low voiced breezes play.” - The words of Frank Ferrington…

Thoreau wrote, “Nature itself means nothing, says nothing except to the perceiving mind…Beauty is where it is perceived. You surely will see if you are prepared to see it - if you look for it.”

George Washington Carver wrote, “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.”

I think you will hear some of these whispering voices tonight at some point over the course of my program. If not at the beginning, then definitely by the program’s end, through the words of Jesse Stuart. His thoughts add music to the lyrics, and I think you’ll be able to hear a love song to autumn. If anything, I hope it inspires you to journey out on a path through a forest to hear these sweet strains for yourself.

The cold winds of winter will change that melody when the branches are bare…

****

Don Jackson