September is Classical Music Month, which gives me an opportunity to showcase one of my favorite roses -- 'Operetta.' This gorgeous hybrid tea has been growing in my garden for about 25 years.
It's getting more and more difficult to take pleasure in my garden now that I'm an arthritic 80-year-old crone, partly because I have no problems with my memory and can vividly recall how it looked in earlier years. I have a very good gardener, but his six hours a week represent only a fraction of the time I used to spend in the garden. Gophers, years of drought, and my own fragility have eradicated hundreds of roses that required TLC to live.
I still have hundreds and hundreds of roses, of course, but they were once surrounded by shrubs, perennials, and recurring annuals that left no bare earth visible. Now the gophers have eaten all of this groundcover -- thousands of irises, lavateras, alstroemerias, spiraeas, daylilies, abutilons, asters, and even the violets and ditch lilies I once regarded as hostile invaders. The roses are now surrounded by vast expanses of earth, welcoming grassy weeds where no grass ever grew before.
With Calif_Sue's help, I acquired dozens and dozens of gopher-resistant plants to fill in those spaces, but some strange new breed of underground monster has been tunneling under the flower beds and pushing those plants up, out of the soil, and I usually don't find them until they're beyond redemption.
The main difference, however, is the lack of cats. There were always 20 or 30 cats in the garden in past years -- my own cats, neighborhood cats, ferals, and fosters. I stopped doing cat rescue work 15 years ago because I didn't want the cats to outlive me, so now I'm down to my last kitty. A neighbor's cat also spends all day in my garden, but he hates my cat, so they don't play or nap together. Here's one of my favorite photos of how things used to be. It shows five of my cats napping together on the deck in spring.
