Somewhere there is a picture of me in the rose garden at home with my stepmother, aged five or six. I was clearly transfixed by the roses and, whilst I can’t remember it, I am fairly sure that the rose was the first flower to implant itself firmly within both my heart and my imagination. My birthday is on 4 June, to coincide with the first great flowering, so perhaps the excitement attendant to that reinforced what has become my greatest floral love affair.
If I could only grow one plant it would be the rose, and the wilder species roses that flower only once and in crystalline simplicity are just as lovely as the more recently bred continually flowering examples, lovelier even. I adore the sweetbriar roses in my hedges, whose leaves release the crisp scent of apple when rubbed.
