Speaking of Weeks, Sue and I had the funniest encounter with the worst kind of rose snob (the kind that doesn't know much about anything) at a nursery on the highway in Petaluma. She told us stock was low because she thought someone might have gone bankrupt. We told her that Weeks had gone bankrupt and she was horrified, saying that was a terrible tragedy for them because there was noplace else to buy roses. I mentioned Star (where they obviously do already order roses because there were lots of different Romantica roses in stock), but she said Star was no good because they don't carry ancient roses. Sue and I asked whether she meant old garden roses, dating back to before 1862. No, she said, not old, but ancient!
She then proceeded to tell us at great length about her favorite "ancient" roses: Rosa Mundi and Quatre Saisons. You would have admired my restraint when she butchered the pronunciations of both. It's not that I think everyone should know how to pronounce Latin and French names, but if you're going to almost climb up to a podium to pontificate on your favorites, you should at least have some inkling of how their names are pronounced. She wasn't talking to us as fellow rose lovers, after all. She made it clear that we were idiots who knew nothing about "ancient" roses.
Okay, so she couldn't pronounce foreign names, and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps I was being too nitpicky, but then she mispronounced mauve (she said "mwahv'), which is a common English word, and my restraint came to an end. I laughed out loud. We walked away at that point and we never even pointed out that her initial comment, her horror of Star as someplace that didn't carry ancient roses, which had served as the cause of her condescending lecture to us, was also stupid because Weeks doesn't carry "ancient" roses either.
