The roses have been tantalizing me this year like no other.
Long-stemmed beauties from the florist, I could take or leave. But the garden variety roses, with their frowsy blooms and intoxicating perfumes have drawn me to a dreamy garden place.
Back-to-back trips to cities where the summer arrives earlier on soft sea breezes are to blame.
In Portland, Ore., at the city’s International Rose Test Garden, I all but ran down row after row of just-beginning-to-bloom bushes. The peak season is sometime in the future, but for a short spring hour, I was drunk on the romance of blossoms on the verge and fell hard in love with a vagrant spray of Constance Spry near a path, her frilly sepals cupping lipstick-pink buds.
A week later, on the vast manicured grounds of the Woodside, Calif., mansion Filoli, I flirted shamelessly with spicy white flowers dipping down from terraced beds and tenderly touched an arch of climbers where pale pink had faded to white with rosy freckles.
Such glorious drifts of glossy green punctuated by bursts of color and fragrance seem unlikely in the seared corners of my own yard devoted to things that might bloom. But a gardener can always dream.
