I’m not a botanist. I know nothing about horticulture. I even flunked a test on leaf identification in high school biology. Apart from pruning, spreading mulch, and heavy lifting, I tend to leave the gardening to Laura. However, we both made a discovery this past week.
Shortly after we moved to this house I was cutting grass and noticed a “weed” in our front yard. I did know enough botany to identify it as the remnants of a rose bush that was struggling to make a comeback. Apparently the previous owners had just kept mowing over it. I hammer a stake next to it so that it would continue to grow, and I wouldn’t mow over it myself. After a year or so, it finally bloomed. Now it is a prolific wild rose, with multiple flowers, as seen in the first photo above.
Now to the discovery. Two years ago I created a new flower garden for Laura in our side yard. We had planted some hybrid roses there, and they had initially thrived. This year when they came back, they looked exactly like the wild roses. Apparently the hybrids had been grafted onto wild rose stock. During last year’s extreme drought, the rose died back. Now the graft is dead, and only the wild rose remains.
Fortunately, one o the hybrids did survive,,,
