A Good Day for Bees and Roses

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This Rose, the one we call Coral Pink Rose, is beloved of the bees. It blooms with abandon and its Flower Essence gives with equal abandon. The Essence is a gift of such comfort, softening our experiences of grief, loss, and anxiety about those we love.

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This Rose, Therese Bugnet, got covered by one of the Wild Roses that jumped into the Rose garden and became somewhat of a garden hog. I guess this is what you’d expect from a Rose that says about itself, ” I canna abide confinement.”

Anyways, I made a deal with this particular Wild Rose that I would honor several other of its monumental brothers on the farm, if I could yank him out of the Rose garden. This removal, done last fall, involved me and Jim, the truck in four wheel drive, a come along, every set of clippers on the farm, our blood, our sweat, and our tears. With its tenacious root system and sharp canes whipping around, it was quite a moment when it finally came out of the ground.

I have lived up to my end of the deal by keeping three other large Wild Rose specimens in the gardens, each one perched on the edge of the hayfield where they are home to a cast of a thousand birds who know they are safe from all predators, tucked into those abundantly thorned branches.

This spring, in the gap where the Wild Rose was, this Therese Bugnet sprang back into exuberant life. Today I am making a Flower Essence from her sweet soft pale magenta pink petals.

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Across the garden from Therese Bugnet is another Rose that the bees are enjoying, Rosa Mundi. Here a native bee dives into this ancient but timeless beauty, ever a Flower Essence consolation when our romance with divinity feels a bit much.

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Our Rosa Mundi has mingled its branches inseparably with branches of another ancient Rose, Rosa Gallica, the ancient mother of almost all modern Roses. She is also known as the Apothecary Rose, because attar or Essential oil of Rose was originally made from this Rose. As a Flower Essence she has an incredibly grounding quality and helps us know precisely who we are.
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Right near the Rosa Mundi and Rosa Gallica is Agathe Incarnata Rose. Her Flower Essence gift helps us to translate the intention to be loving into being love.

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Doesn’t she look like Love incarnate????

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Here is another beautiful Rose that I am making into an Essence today. This is Alba Maxima, a soft, soft pink Rose that has grown into an immense towering shrub of Flowers in the perennial gardens. I look forward to sitting down with Alba Maxima and Therese Bugnet to find out what their Flower Essences are all about.
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Madame Hardy Rose grows cheek by jowl with Alba Maxima. I made her into an Essence last year and the Angels asked that we put her into our Grief and Loss mix. As Madam Hardy explains, “I AM for heartache. I know you think you have heard it all before yet I offer a sweet and unique note of consolation to those who lose a lover or a most cherished friend or place. I AM consolation and comfort amidst loss.”

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Here is Tuscany Rose, another ancient Rose. I have found it very hard to capture the velvety quality of her petals in a photograph. The Angels have told me that she is an important Flower Essence for the next stretch of time and that I should bring her forward to people’s attention. Her Flower Essence is about finding from the depths of ourselves the sweet refreshing restorative wisdom that ever lives within us. Tuscany Rose compares this experience to pulling a bucket of deeply refreshing and restorative cool water up from a well.
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This was my last Flower Essence made today, Nepeta “Six Hill Giants”, the beautiful blue catmint that sets off so many of the Roses in the Rose garden. Here shown with the incomparable Mary Rose. The bees can’t get enough of this catmint and so the bed is a buzz when it is in blossom. Another one to sit with once the Essence is in the jars. I suspect this one is for playful rejuvenation and relaxation. At least that’s what the cats think!

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And so there we are on this gorgeous June day!

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