I mean, yes, I am wearing tie dye, and yes, I am in front of some Grateful Dead art… and it does look like something you would see in an altered state of mind. But my hair isn’t long enough, and doesn’t hang half way down my back, because this isn’t an actual picture of me from ‘back in the day’… but still, it sort of sets the mood for the post I did just before this post… you know… if you want to go back and read that one now… the one with all the roses… or whatever.
So now you know all about the rare roses of Berkeley… or you do if you read the earlier posts in this series. I promised you a story, and here it is:
Many years ago… back in a strange time called by some; ‘the day’… I and a friend of mine, maybe the best friend I ever had, and who is now no longer with us, had an idea.
There was a Grateful Dead concert playing the next day at one of the colleges in the Bay Area. We had tickets. You may or may not know that roses are associated with the Grateful Dead. In the… uh… mental state that we happened to be in… (hey, don’t judge me, it was ‘back in the day’)… we suddenly realized that this was a cosmic confluence of events.
We were going to see a band that is associated with roses, and we lived just a few miles from a place that was full of rare roses found only in a few places in the entire world. You can probably see where this is going.
Yeah, we grabbed some pruning clippers and a bunch of big trash bags… gloves would have been a good idea too… and we drove to the Berkeley Rose Garden, hopped the fence, and clipped hundreds… maybe thousands… of roses.
Okay, simmer down. We only took two or three from each bush, and roses only last a few days anyway, and rose bushes are not hurt when you do this, in fact, it is good for them.
The next day, we stood outside the concert venue… in an even more enhanced state of mind… and gave one rose to every girl of any age who walked by. If you don’t know anything about a Grateful Dead concert, you should Google it… or YouTube it… or whatever it is you do these days. People wear bright colors… you know… tie dye… I’m sure you have seen it around…
And the hippy girls in their long, flowing skirts, twirling around to the music, each holding a single, long-stemmed rose of colors seldom seen, it really was a magical day. I hope you can forgive our youthful exuberance.
But it isn’t easy to tell stories about ‘back in the day’ on a family-friendly blog.
I know, it doesn’t even look like a rose, does it? You would know why, if you read the previous posts in this series.
And no, I am still not ready to tell my other funny story yet.
Just enjoy the pretty colors for now.
Stop and smell the photos of roses.
And I have to tell you, some of these roses smelled phenomenal. Just like the colors of some of them are unusual, so too are the scents… did that make sense… from a grammatical point of view?
I smelled on that smelled like roses and lemons. A few had no smell at all, but some were rich and deep, and some were light and fruity.
One smelled like honey, another like lavender.
The very air was alive with fragrance.
This is well worth a visit, if ever you are in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Okay, one more post of these, and I swear, I will tell my story.
Okay, in the last post, I explained why the roses in the Berkeley Rose Garden are so rare that they might exist only in one or two other places in the world.
In the next post… or the one after that… I will tell a funny story about this place.
But for now, let’s just enjoy the roses.
Because… roses!!!
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the rose garden has lovely trees and trails, a stream and little waterfalls too. And there are other parks across the street from it and all around it that are awesome. The Bay Area values its nature.
Also, the climate there is perfect for almost any kind of plant, from cacti to redwoods, palm trees to ferns, and everything in between.
And, like I said, the rose garden is in the Berkeley hills, so you get views of the Golden Gate and San Francisco through the trees.
But mostly… roses.
A reader asked why I called these roses in Berkeley rare. No, I didn’t choose the word carelessly. I am sure I told this story a long time ago, but let’s go through it again. It turns out that all over the world, there are people who take flowers very seriously. Orchid breeders are probably the most… uh… committed? Intense? I’m sure there is a good word for it, but I don’t know what it is… rabid seems a little excessive, though. But rose breeders are not far behind.
Now I am not talking about people who like to have roses in their gardens. I am talking about the breeders, who take clippings off one rose and graft them to splits in other rose bushes, repeating this process many times over many years, and coming up with whole new varieties of roses.
These people often have hothouses or greenhouses that might look more like a laboratory than a place for growing plants. And they frequently name the new rose species after dear, departed loved ones, or give them cool, nonsensical names.
This explains why some of the roses you are looking at almost don’t look like roses anymore. You know, kind of like we are breeding dogs that almost don’t look like dogs anymore.
Anyway, these people show their roses in flower shows around the world, but they don’t always want to share them with the public. That doesn’t mean that they don’t want recognition. So they usually send a small rose bush to one other place on Earth. That is this rose garden, the Berkeley Rose Garden, which is part of the University of California, Berkeley, thus ensuring that their rose will be officially and scientifically recognized by botanists.
This also makes this the coolest rose garden anywhere, because you can find, if you show up at the right time, black roses, and parfait-colored roses and roses of colors you never knew existed.
And maybe, just maybe, that black rose exists only here, and in one hothouse in South Africa.
I didn’t see any black roses on this visit, but I have more pictures and posts coming. And I have another great story about this place. So stay tuned.
Oh, and it is in the Berkeley hills, so you get free views of San Francisco thrown in.
Yes, those are roses… and I have a bunch more pictures of roses… and some stories to tell about the roses. For now, just enjoy the roses.
I am falling behind on posting about my Bay Area adventures!
Okay, I realize that, technically, walking into my mom’s backyard and taking pictures of flowers might not classify as an adventure…
But who doesn’t like flowers?
And being in the garden reminds me of my childhood.
I like that one, you can see my mom’s hand reaching to touch the flower.
There used to be less flowers in the garden, more forts and climbing trees and plums and blackberries we could eat. Yum!
I took my mom down to the bay after our walk in the garden. We brought some burgers and shakes and had a picnic. Yes, that is the same place I go to meet dogs when I am here and missing our dog. Good eye.
I have a funny story… with some funny pictures… from this adventure, which I will share in a later post. I like to play around with my camera. This time I was using some thistles and flowers in the foreground with the city in the background, and changing the focal point. You never know how a picture might turn out.
You may have notice that I did the same thing in some of the sunset photos I posted, where I would focus on the trees in the foreground, and then the sun behind them, and post both pictures. That one of the Golden Gate seems to have focused somewhere in the middle. Oh well.
What can I say? I like sunsets.
I like my mom’s deck.
I like my mom.
I like trees and sky.
I like earth and water.
I like colors.
Okay, it is time to get back to… uh… whatever it is that I do around here…
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Pouring My Art Out by Arthur H. Browne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Based on a work at https://pouringmyartout.wordpress.com/.
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Pouring My Art Out 