Mum's Roses

These photos were taken of the roses in my parents' garden November 2010 - one of the roses is the Minnie Watson, which our family is very proud of.  My father's mother was Minnie Watson, though the rose was not named after her.

Roses and Creepers

These photos I took yesterday. Walking along the streets of Jeonju South Korea, I saw this wonderful creeper on a wall. Later I walked past the roses. They seem to have appeared out of nowhere and there are many blooming around the place.

I had thought of creeping out at night with a pair of scissors to "claim" one for me, but the students gave me some flowers.

Tabletop roses

We had lunch at a wonderful hotel in Shangyu, in Zhejiang province in southern China. On the table were some wonderful fresh roses. They looked spectacular on the round table. They glistened too, as they had been sprayed with a fine mist of water. Enjoy.

The Rose Garden

The miniature roses.

The rose garden (April and May)

When we came to Shaoxing at the end of February, the area had experienced a cold winter, and it had snowed here. One of the gardens near the apartment building that houses many of the foreign teachers, there was a garden that seemed to have a large number of dried sticks about 5 inches high in it. On closer inspection you could see it was a bed of roses.

I don't think in Australia we would have pruned them back so much - but things are different here.

The top photo was taken on April 17 th, as foliage was beginning to sprout on the plants. The second photo was taken just last week.

What a difference a few weeks makes in such a garden. Also on the school campus is an area near one of the other buildings where there is a bed of what I now discover is miniature roses and they too are in full bloom right now.

Miniature Roses

There are thousands of varieties of roses. These are miniature roses grown in a pot. You can see the change of colour as the flower matures. There's yellow in the centre when the bloom first opens and it fades to white or dark pink as time goes by.