Posted by Loulou on Jun 10, 2013 | 0 comments

Okay, more rose talk. But it’s for a reason. Or for next season, haha

Mama says that she only wants smelly roses in her garden, and boy, there are some doozies–Sweet Love, for example, which mama bought for her and papa, signifying their, well, you know all that mooshie stuff they do all the time–and there is a really, really beautiful orangey one called Chateaubriand, don’t ask why–for me that means romantic dinner for two and a lot of meat and red wine, but for the rose guy who hybridizes (that’s what it’s called when you think up new roses and graft and clone and mix and match, so to speak), it must have meant something a little more profound than ‘meat’ (such as a famous French statesman and writer?)

So here I am, basking in the glory of mama’s rose bushes (mainly for the mulch, which resembles you know what and so I sneak out and do you know what in the you know what when no one is watching, and as I bask, I ask myself, what are the really smelly roses of all time so that I can tell my kitty friends’ mamas or papas so that they can plant them and their kitties can loll about the way I do with this amazing perfume in the air making these early summer days full of joy and wonder for sensitive kitties like me.

I observed that mama has a rose book, for France, that is, and I think she knows a couple of other roses that do really well on the west coast of the USA. But, of course, everything grows in California all year round and you can PROPAGATE roses all year round, too (a word I love, which could mean reinforcement for a door or…).  That means, I observed in her rose book, that you cut a 12-inch piece of a stem of a rose you’d like more of, leaving two sets of leaves on the stem and you cut off the top, too, so now you have a stem with two leaf-sets and you dust the bottom of the stem with a rooting hormone (lots of those in nurseries) and you simply make a hole in some good soil in a 6-inch pot or even right in the ground (!) and you put the stem down in the pot or earth and water well. Every day. If it is spring, water all the time to encourage the roots to form, but if you do this in fall, and you’re in a climate with rain, you can just water a bit so that the stem does not dry out and then let the rains do the rest.

Now this is really funny: to have a rose baby, it takes NINE MONTHS!!! Haha. Isn’t that just too wonderful?

Now I would choose Sweet Love over all the roses in the world except for maybe Double Delight, which is a rose given to mama by her garden guru, John Churchman, many years ago and the fragrant flowers of which she cut to take to a dinner in LA with an old friend’s (semi-lecherous but charming) daddy and when he walked into the restaurant, mama and papa saw that he had TWINS with him–knock down, drag out female, buxom TWINS of about 20 (he was 60 at the time) and here mama was with her Double Delight roses for him….hahaha, they laughed over that one for years!

Below you can see the beauty of Sweet Love, but for good smells, I roll around under the Bataclan yellow rose bush or Madamoiselle Cecile Brunner that climbs all over the place, just like me on Annapura. I’m going to talk with the mama of Brough (rest his soul) and Sybil, two of my distant relations, and she is an expert on smelly roses so maybe she’ll help me name a few more next time.

You know, I sit here pawing out these opinions, thoughts, you name it every day and I’d love to hear from anyone who has anything to say to a kitty on the keys.

And think of this–that baby you have from Sweet Love NEVER needs a diaper change…..