Roses and farts.

I have made an interesting discovery. The most beautiful roses, the ones that look almost carved to perfection, the ones that seem to shout out, "Hey, look at me!" tend to have no scent.

It is the same with farts. The louder they are, the less lethal their odour. It's the silent ones that are deadliest.

Which makes me wonder ... do the most beautiful roses have the deadliest thorns?

An imperfectly carved, but perfectly scented rose in my mother's garden

Roses, roses.

Roses are difficult to grow, they say. So it was only after a lot of googling that I finally got the courage to invest in a few rose plants last month:

Of course, they all look lovely to start with - one can't help but buy the plants with the prettiest blooms (and the most scented - which, oddly enough, is a hard quality to come by - a lot of roses these days look lovely but have no scent at all!) but the thought that's niggled my mind was what these beauties would look like after they'd been in in my hands for a few months!

All these blooms have now wilted, withered, been snipped off (at just the right point - which is just above the first five-leafed stem beneath a bloom) and made their way to the composter. I studied those shorn tips for quite a while, and quite nervously, but have finally been rewarded with two little buds appearing on two of the plants! I suppose only children and garden-lovers will understand that wild joy that comes with getting a stick in the earth to grow into something! I am both child and gardener, and am doubly joyful - or perhaps it's just pre-menopausal hormonal fluctuations that makes my heart flutter so!

I can't wait for them to blossom, and share my new home-grown blooms with you.