Roses

The roses in our garden are a delight this year;  there are just so many flowers.  It may be all the rain - it's doing it again as I write these words.  Though I did also prune them pretty hard, and I've fed all the plants in those borders fairly well.

To be honest, I'm not a great fan of roses, or haven't been.  For me they've always seemed such a lot of work, and of course however hard I try I'll always manage to snag a thorn!  You have to prune them, once, twice usually, and then make sure they're properly fed, and that you remove any suckers that appear - which of course have even more thorns than the flowering stems;  they're a magnet for aphids, and then there's black spot on the leaves, all kinds of pests and diseases it seems;  and you have to keep dead-heading them to persuade them to keep flowering;  not to mention the fact that this one has tall stems that keep blowing down, and then spear you viciously when you try to stake or tie them back up . . .

. . . but this year I'm nearly persuaded it's worth it.  These are such tremendous flowers.  It's just a pity that it keeps raining, and I can't get out there and enjoy their company!