Roses. Take 50.

My wife and I have not had a good history with the roses we have planted together. That may not be entirely our fault.

At our previous house the dirt was like sand except for the mysterious spots where it looked like someone may have dumped the used motor oil from their oil changing business directly onto the ground in our backyard. We bought at least ten rose bushes. For one summer, neighbors would come by and tell us that our yard looked amazing and that the yard had never looked that good for as long as they could remember. By the end of that summer, all of the roses were dead.

Another lovely aspect of working the soil at that house was how every shovel full of dirt had at least one piece of broken glass in it. No matter how many times you tilled it or raked it or turned it over and walked every broken shard to the garbage can, the glass was always there.

So it is now my hope that that particular yard was our gardening jinx. This is a new house with a new yard. I haven't found a single piece of broken glass. This house has several fruit trees but not a single flower on the place.

We don't want to start from scratch next year so we planted a couple hundred tulip bulbs. But then we had nice patches of soft, clean and raked dirt that the neighborhood cats have taken as an invitation to pop in and poop for a bit so we bought a couple of flats of pansies and four rose bushes. All the flowers are on sale but gardeners seem to agree that this is a fine time to plant and let things get established so they can take off in spring.

We have always done well with snapdragons and bleeding hearts but I'll keep my fingers crossed that everything will soon be coming up roses.