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Sometimes I write things

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I decided today was the day to remove Aurora's first bloom. The stamens are drying up and it's starting to wilt, and I wanted to save some petals from it. So I cut down to the first nodes with leaves and brought it inside to place the petals on my blotter paper before pressing.

Maybe a bit excessive, but I had the whole sheet so I just plucked every solid looking petal I could. A lot of them are curled a bit, so I doubt they'll all survive and look good in a few weeks.

I count 32 petals and there's probably 8 or 10 left on the crumpled mess left that I put in my lawn to decompose.

It smelled fantastic when I cut it and smelled it up close. Faint, but very like a typical damask rose.

Now we'll see how the plant reacts. I hope she does well. She has more buds coming. This was her first bloom and I'm glad I enjoyed it while I could, but flowers aren't meant to last. They're fireworks, not paintings. Brief and beautiful and transient.

As are we all, really.

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It's very much a good news/bad news thing for Rosita this week. The bad news, and it's very bad news in my book, is that she's developed another round of powdery mildew even though I sulfur sprayed her last Thursday. I think my sprayer is not very good, so she's just getting a lot of droplets instead of a nice even covering, so I'm switching to a new sprayer this coming Thursday (tomorrow night as of posting this).

The really bad part is that most of her buds now have a gray coating on them, including the one in the second picture that's trying to develop and clearly tearing its sepals as it does so. I'm leaving them for now, but I think I'll need to deadhead and prune aggressively in the coming weeks as soon as this first flush even makes an attempt at blooming.

The good news is that the third photo is an undamaged new bud, nice and green. Rosita has a lot of trichomes on her buds, that is, they're very fuzzy. Many modern types of roses have smooth sepals, that is, no fuzz.

The last photo is to show that Aurora, the Veranda Lavender rose I have, has much smaller sepals hiding behind her bloom than the bloom itself would suggest. Since Rosita has far fewer petals per bloom (about half, if that), it tells me that her buds don't need to be nearly so large before they open. I'm hoping very much that some of her buds open soon so I can end this awful experiment and start removing her graying buds.

The problem is that roses are driven by hormones and biology and weather. She's trying very hard to bloom right now, and me pruning off all her current graying buds because they're not perfect won't help her do anything except start over with more buds. Or so my understanding goes. It's incredibly frustrating and more than a little scary. But she still has over twenty weeks to go until Halloween, which is roughly when I'll start worrying about her going into dormancy. It's enough time, if she can pick up the pace and grow more architecture. I want to think she's steadily growing roots below ground no matter how stalled or slow her growth above is.

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I was mistaken: that first bloom opened up fully, and you can see the stamens after all. That's a lot more petals than I'm used to seeing on a fully open rose.

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This is probably as big as Aurora's first bloom is going to get. You can see the petals on the very outside are starting to curl down, which means it's probably going to start wilting in another day or two.

But still. I grew this. Feels pretty good.

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Another little check-in on Rosita for anybody interested. The levels of zoom are a little different, unfortunately, but here's the middle canes, focusing on that red one in the middle, from May 17, May 24, and today, May 31. To show the subtle fading of the red and the growing clusters.

And here's the wide shot comparison between one week ago today and today.

There hasn't been a lot of explosive growth. It's all been very slow. She had an extremely rough week the week before last and is only really now getting to dry out and recover from it.

Here's a cluster of buds from May 25 and then from today. You can see that the buds themselves haven't grown much, but they're separating and the pedicels (stems holding each bud) have elongated and reddened, showing new tissue growth.

I don't lvoe the slight gray sheen on them. But they're also unusually fuzzy, that is, they have a lot of trichomes, and I'm trying to convince myself that it's dust and fuzz from the air rather than mold.

I've had to cut off a few because they were dying. But shes' growing a lot of buds at this point.

You can clearly tell there are still a lot of stressed leaves on her. Leaves don't heal, so those won't get better. All I can do is try to keep taking care of her while she replaces them with better leaves.

I did spray some sulfur on her last Thursday, partly because of all the water she got the week before making me think a precaution against mildew would be wise. And then I actually did find powdery mildew on several of her leaves last Wednesday, which confirmed that another weekly sulfur dose was necessary. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to have to get a better spray bottle, because the one I have doesn't make a nice even mist. So some leaves aren't getting much sulfur on them at all and some are getting enough to be burned by it. It's not great, but she needs a fungicide to stay healthy right now.

I shouldn't have to explain that the Veranda Lavender has hit a significant milestone this week: her bud opened.

Hesitantly, at first, as you can see in these photos from the 27th and 29th.

But by today, it looks very much like the typical "Veranda Lavender" you can find if you look those flowers up online. It's huge compared to the rest of her. I'm quite surprised. It has very little scent, but that's fine.

She also has another new bud up in her canopy.

It's small, but you can see it in this photo from yesterday.

I mentioned a week ago that I'd needed to prune off a piece of her. There's been a lot of growth around that cut piece.

Which is good, because I had to cut off four more pieces this week as I found even more little black lesions in various other parts.

My working theory at the moment is that she arrived from the nursery with very sensitive and tender growth, weakened further from her week in shipping. There was a massive storm with high winds two weeks ago that I think stressed and made tiny fractures in her in various places, and I was still finding those same lesions as recently as two days ago.

Now, you can probably tell that the lesions in these photos are quite a bit bigger than the dark spots I cut off less than two weeks ago. My hunch is that this is what those dark spots would have turned into. I can't prove it.

I have spent a lot more time since two days ago rifling through her every branch and stem to try and find any more damage that needs to be pruned away. But you can still see from the weekly comparison photos that, thank God, she's outgrowing the pruning I'm doing to her.

I asked my dad after I got her if he had name ideas. I named Rosita myself, and I thought it only fair he have an opportunity to help me name this Veranda Lavender. He suggested a few names, but one that stuck with me was Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn. Her colors are pink, purple, and green.

I pointed out to him that I know a guy, one of my best childhood friends, who decided to name his first biological daughter with his first wife (who had at least one kid of her own from a previous marriage) Aurora. But I don't mind reusing names I've heard before.

I never liked that he named his kid Aurora. He named her after the Disney Princess (Whose name, by the way, was "Brier Rose" in the original Grimm fairy tale). It seemed silly to me. I knew this guy. I knew his wife. Their daughter wasn't a princess. She was just another low-class low-income white kid same as he and I had been.

Maybe she'll rise above her station someday. Hard to say. That friend spent some time behind bars when Aurora was a few years old because his wife accused him of sexually abusing his slightly older stepdaughter. So I'm not holding my breath. He's out now, for whatever that's worth. I don't know if he's involved with his stepkids or his biological kids anymore.

In any case.

I like to imagine that, someday, when VL has many flowers, in the floribunda clusters she's meant to have, that they really will look like an aurora during a sunset. The light will pass through the petals and scatter across the whole plant, and she will look like she's bathed in pink and purple. It'll be pretty.

So I'll try to start calling her Aurora. It won't be easy. For one thing, I'm still terrified that she could collapse and die. There were so many lesions I had to cut away. I worry she may have a systemic infection. But she's growing. She's blooming. She's doing her best. Parts of her are doing well. Parts of her are not.

That's all any of us can hope for, human or plant, I suppose.

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Sometimes my cat Max will decide when he gets on my lap while I'm at the computer that he wants to rest his chin on the table in front of me. I used to wonder if he was watching my monitor, so I decided a few months ago to try taking photos.

No. He's not watching anything.

Well, not usually.

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I don't have the patience in me to replay EarthBound but seriously I don't think a 12 month period has gone by since it was first published that I haven't rewatched the entirety of Chuggaconroy's playthrough on YouTube

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It's been another week or so (six days since the last post about her, but the photos from that post were from seven and fourteen days ago), so I figured I'd post another comparison to show how Rosita is doing.

The short answer is: mixed! We had two days above 90 degrees F here, Monday and Tuesday, followed by two days of an inch or more of rain each on Wednesday and Friday, that is, yesterday, plus more rain today on Saturday, which is why the mulch is still wet in today's photo.

But you can see she's still growing more and more leaves, even though her older ones have turned yellow and some are clearly failing after all that stress.

However, she's also started to develop some very small, very fuzzy, green buds. The first photo is looking like an actual polyantha cluster, with four or maybe even five buds all grouped together. The other two photos each have a single bud in them.

I was told it would be good to let them bloom, but to deadhead them once they're done until at least August, when it would be okay to start letting a cluster go and see if she is capable of making rose hips. I'd like to give that a shot.

But otherwise, I freely acknowledge that she's a bit damaged and stressed from the weather. She even had some soil erosion and I had to sprinkle some more topsoil around her crown this morning, which is why it's a little darker today. But that topsoil has stuck around for now. It's just that when you get two and a half inches of rain in one week, there's going to be some erosion.

I hope to move the mulch back in later this week as well. I don't like having it pulled back this far.

As for my Veranda Lavender, or VL, she's also a bit mixed this week. She did lose that big chunk off the left due to a possible canker infection, but you can see that she's rallied and continued to grow elsewhere.

Her one and only bud (she's a floribunda, so what the fuck, why only one bud?) is so swollen that there's significant "petal pressure" coming from inside the sepals and we might only be a few days from it bursting open.

I had to put some topsoil on her crown as well, and this is it after some additional rain. She has some stretch marks on that central cane and the one on the right has always had that black crud encrusted on it, which I don't dare mess with. However, you can see some red bumps growing on the left one, which is nice. Those aren't prickles; they're growth.

For reference for why I added that soil, the first photo in that pair is from yesterday evening. There's a pale spot right at the base of her center cane where the soil washed away and exposed some material that should stay buried. But there's also a potential new red shoot coming from her base, which I seem to have accidentally reburied today! I might want to see about that later... Not that I think excavating is a good idea to try and unbury it. I'll just have to hope it unburies itself, I suppose. And if it doesn't, maybe it just wasn't meant to be. But I don't think leaving those feeder roots exposed to the air would have been better for her.

I will keep hoping for the continued growth of both roses, of course, and especially for at least the first flower on VL to show in another week. The plan was always to give her her real name after her first bloom, and that might only be a few days away. Because I named Rosita without even running it past my dad (it was sort of a joke nickname and he decided he liked it enough he started calling her by it, too, until it became her name), I asked him for some ideas for VL, and we might go with one of his. We'll see, I suppose.

In somewhat funnier (to me, at least) news, the marigold I circled in that top photo from this morning is doing really well in the second photo that I took this afternoon. What's funny about it is that she lost her central stem completely several days ago and spent a few looking very limp and like she was dying. But she had a second bud on her, on one of two side stems. So she decided, somehow, in plant logic, to tilt sideways and make that side stem go vertical, and now it looks like she just has a little limp growth on one side near her base and a few fewer leaves on the other side than you'd expect. This would be like a person losing their head, growing a second head out of their right shoulder, and just tilting their torso as new arms grew out of their old neck stump and the base of their ribcage.

In other words, it's just amazing to me to see how an herbaceous annual can completely reorient itself and improvise entirely new structure like this.

My salvia and nepeta, of course, are fine. The middle salvia in the garden is still standing tall and doing his best to defy God and prove his hubris is justified. The nepeta continues to get bushier and is now almost as tall as the salvias. And the salvia on the far left in the wide shot has one stem that fell to the ground a week ago, lifted itself just enough to curve its stem skyward, and is the first to get some deadheading because it also had a couple of tiny flower stems that began to dry out and look skeletal. He's fine, of course, and will regrow even more now that he's been trimmed.

And that's as many gardening updates as I can reasonably cram into a post.

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So these weird dark spots appeared on my second rose, the Veranda Lavender, around Wednesday of last week. After tracking them for several days, it become undeniable that they were getting larger, so yesterday I finally had to cut the cane they were on.

Here's the before and after.

So it was a big chunk of her, but she's still doing okay, I hope. I hope better, actually.

I did go back and cut off that little dead stem right below the cut, because 1) it had a black spot itself and 2) it had no leaves.

In the morning, she looked pretty alright, and I'm hoping this dark smudge where I cut the leaf stem off is from bruising because I scraped her with my scissors.

In case it doesn't go without saying, I did sanitize with rubbing alcohol before and after every single cut I made. And I used actual pruners for the cut on the cane. It's just that the scissors have narrower blades, so I used those for the leaf.

Now, she arrived in her cardboard box with a bud that stalled for over two weeks before it started to finally open last Thursday. I've kept it on as an experiment to see if it would eventually open, though it's clearly a little malformed and stunted. It also has black dots on it, but these two photos are 13 hours apart, and they haven't grown, so I'm continuing to leave it alone for now.

As for what those black spots were, my best guess is canker, an opportunistic fungal infection. I did spray her with a Safer Brand sulfur spray last Thursday, the day after I saw the spots, which was simply a coincidence and not planned. I had already planned on spraying that night because it was a dry night before several humid days, and she'd never been sprayed before due to her being a young plant and sulfur spray being a little stressful to even healthy roses. But it's about as gentle a fungicide as you can get.

We'll see what happens from here.

She's also been growing this new bud for over a week now. I'm more optimistic about it.

She's a floribunda, meaning she forms blooms in clusters. She's just too young and too small and was defoliated and transplanted too recently to be making clusters yet.

My other rose, Rosita, is almost certainly a polyantha. Those form even bigger clusters. But she's still figuring out how to survive her own very bad transplant shock right now and hasn't formed any buds at all since she went in the ground on April 20.

So it goes.

At the end of the day, neither rose is making "rational" decisions or thinking ahead about anything they're doing. I anthropomorphize them a lot, like using female pronouns and giving them names and talking about Rosita "figuring out how to survive," but I do know they're not thinking creatures.

I'm an animal with a brain. I'm good at thinking about animals with brains, and thinking of things as being animals with brains. Roses have no brains. No central nervous system. No one thing that makes decisions for them. They're a modular set of parts each influencing and being influenced by the rest of the parts they're connected to. It's how you can take a cutting and turn it into its own plant. At some point, this "piece" of the original becomes a new plant entirely.

I've spent a lot of nights having genuine existential dread thinking about that kind of thing.

But at the end of it all, I just have to accept that two things are true at the same time:

1: Roses, like all the plants in my garden, are living things. They are complex, they react to changes in their environment, and they have the ability to sense the world around them in their own limited ways. They take actions based on their biology and evolutionary pressures, including artificial selection set up by humans to modify them over centuries. These simple sets of rules combine to create emergent behaviors that can be fairly described as "decision making" and "personality." I genuinely feel great affection for all the plants in my garden, including all forty-seven of the marigolds that I know will die in six months.

2: All of my plants are brainless, unthinking, unconscious, will never love me back the way that I love them, and they live in, grow in, and consume shit and rot in order to survive and thrive.

That's just how it is. There are no tiny dryads living in the canes of my roses. They do not know I exist as a human being who cares for them. They may sense that there is a large thing that stomps around near them that vibrates their roots and manipulates their leaves and stems, but I doubt they "know" that when I water or feed or spray them that it's me doing it. The world simply is what it is for them at any given point, without memory of the past or plans for the future, and their hormones drive them to act in the present moment. I've literally been pricked by one of Rosita's thorns and dripped blood onto the soil at her base, but she does not know she consumed human blood. At most, she might be aware that my breath causes localized concentrations of carbon dioxide to increase or that a tiny amount of nitrogen reached her roots where my drop of blood broke down nearby.

I think about this a lot.

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I've donated a lot of blood, but not as fast as I could have. The minimum to donate 8 gallons, or 64 pints, would be 512 weeks, or about nine and a half years. It took me over twenty. But still. I try to donate when I can. For a few years, I had chronic anemia problems and my iron levels were too low, so that didn't help.

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Some comparison photos. The first two are Rosita from a week ago and today. The second two are VL, the Veranda Lavender, from a week ago and then today. The lighting makes her look wilted in the photo from a week ago, I admit. I apologize for that. I didn't get any good photos from this angle last Saturday in the morning or at noon.

But either way, you can tell the progress both have made. I've had to deal with some minor issues, like finding another adult sawfly, but it was on VL this time. I also very lightly sprayed sulfur fungicide on them Thursday evening, so now, 36 hours later, you can see that they're both fine.

VL has a new small bud that you can't really see easily in the wide shots, but I'm hoping to show some "start to finish" photos once it opens. Rosita did not, in fact, make new lateral shoots. Everything I'd hoped was a shoot turned out to be more leaf clusters. She needs them very badly, so I'm disappointed they aren't new branches, but I get it. Maybe someday soon. I hope someday soon.

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I spent four and a half hours last night, starting at 5 PM, planting these 47 marigolds around the perimeter of my garden. They're about 9 inches apart from each other. There'd be 48 except that the southeast (front right) corner is rounded, so there wasn't space there. I knew that in the planning phase.

It was a bad idea to start that late. I had hoped it wouldn't take as long as it did, but I still expected the sun to be mostly down. It was, in fact, completely down by the time I took that first photo, with just a little bit of light left. So I had to use a flashlight in one hand while I smoothed out the mulch with my other hand, removing a huge amount of it because the marigolds displaced so much. I filled a 16-inch pot, emptied it, and nearly filled it again, there was so much extra mulch.

The garden looks a lot different when photographed at night with a flash.

But the last photo is from this morning, at around 7:20, after 20 minutes of rearranging and adjusting the mulch even more once I could actually see it properly. All the marigolds are, so far, still alive and upright, though it's barely been 11 hours.

And I did accidentally bend one pretty severely this morning, but I bent it back and it sort of looks straight again, so hopefully it can scar over and recover? Or just regrow from below where I bent it. Marigolds are annuals, not perennials. None of them will still be alive after a couple of hard frosts this November. It's sad, but that's how it is.

I wanted to get safari tangerines, a type of French marigold, because they're good at pest control underground. I was able to find some at the garden center near where I live, but they didn't have enough, so it's either 21 or 24 safari tangerines mixed with safari boleros and safari "mix." They came in packs of 3, so I decided to use RNG to decide what order I'd plant them in. But I did one pack at a time, so the one in the far back left was first, then I went clockwise around the perimeter. So those first three are from the same pack, then the next three from the same pack, and so on.

I do not know which marigolds are which between safari tangerine, safari bolero, and safari mix. It was the only way I could maintain my sanity, because if I had to actually decide how to lay them out, I'd have made myself crazy.

I'm going to try to gather as many seeds as I can this fall. They will likely cross-pollinate and I will end up with something next year that is a mix of all three types. That's fine. They'll be the second generation of this year's group. I hope.

And you might think that if they come in packs of 3 and I have 47 here, where's the extra 48th one? There isn't one. One of the packs only had two marigolds in it. Oops. But it worked out for me, so I guess that's fine.

I will try to write an update about Rosita and VL, my two roses, later. But I promise nothing. I only spent about five and a half hours in bed last night, and I am still quite sore and tired.

Mainly my knees. A lot of squatting, a lot of time spent on my knees. I have kneepads for that reason. They help, but I am pretty old, so my knees still struggle after four and a half hours of constant up and down and pressure. That's how it is!

I'll keep gardening for as long as I can, though. I'm enjoying it, even if it does mean I haven't been able to write much. Now that my garden is mostly done for this year (I know there's a lot of empty space, but most of it will be filled as the plants grow, except the space in the front right that's empty for when I can get a third rose going), I'm really, really, really hoping to get back to working on my novel after nearly four months off.

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Well, she made a second new lateral shoot, it turns out. This one is on the far left, near the ground, as opposed to the one on the far right, near the top.

You can also see a stalled red basal shoot on the right of the first photo; it was a new cane that sprouted when she first came out of dormancy this year, but it had mulch against it and didn't turn green. So when we transplanted her, it turned red pretty quickly. Doesn't look great. Hasn't grown since. But it's clearly alive, and stiff, so I'm leaving it alone and hoping she eventually does something with it. It did have leaves, but they've all died since the transplant.

But the point is, second new lateral shoot. Very exciting. She's trying to build some new architecture. Maybe in another month she'll look like she isn't right on the edge of dying.

I think a lot about life and death and the existential questions that gardening raises. I'd like to write more about that sometime. We'll see.

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New lateral shoots look weird, it turns out. Taken at 6:50 am on May 10.

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I could post a hundred photos of my roses, but these are the two I think are most important this week, both from today.

This is an entirely new lateral shoot that Rosita is growing between a pair of new leaf clusters. I haven't found any more worms on her since I sprayed on Monday, and believe me, I've been looking. She's grown a lot more new leaves, and some of those new leaf clusters have split into two or even three. But this? This is her first new shoot, which could become a branch, since she went in the ground on April 20. I'm very happy to see it. This is the first sign that she's going from emergency recovery to actual rebuilding.

As for VL:

That's a brand new flower bud. She hasn't even been in the garden for two weeks, and she's decided to try a flower. Fucking amazing.

A new shoot and a new flower bud. That's some serious progress today.

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I realize it puts me in the minority, but I do genuinely think the new Star Fox design looks good. I got the impression that Fox and the gang were always meant to look like puppets, like Thunderbirds, and they do here, they look like realistic puppets. It's cool. I've seen multiple podcasts I follow make the joke "fantastic Mr. Star Fox" about the look. Fair, but predictable and lazy.

And I think it puts me in the majority that I do hate that the game is a remake of a reboot. Star Fox 64 was a retelling of Star Fox on SNES. This is their third go round on the same story. Just give us a fucking new game, Jesus Christ.

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This is how my 16 year old cat, Max, starts nearly every morning. He was in bed in the bathroom, near the heater, and when I got to the sink he knew I was going to brush his teeth. He likes the taste of the toothpaste and is very demanding that I hurry up.

I like videos like these because I know in years to come that it will be nice to watch it again and remember how he sounded.