Wrestling Roses

Last night a friend thoughtfully Googled ‘Wrestling Roses’ for me. It brought up lots of pictures of beautiful female wrestlers 😅. This delighted me more than anything, and I decided to continue with the name.

It’s a book title that came to me many years ago at one of the darkest moments in my life. I had been through a massive heartbreak and the rose in my then garden had been left to grow completely wild for the best part of a year as I fell apart.

In the spring I emerged and went into the garden and it had grown nine feet high, and spilled out over half of the small urban space. I set to work wrestling it back into beauty. It tore me up with its thorns, it exhausted me, It overwhelmed me. It was diseased and covered in pests. It took well over two months of dedicated work. Friends came and helped for half an hour here and there but mostly it was me, alone, fighting my way through. And then one day it was done, and June came around, and it bloomed. My God did it bloom.

I visited that rose last year, I took a cutting which is growing voraciously in my current greenhouse, and I was reminded of the title of the book I never wrote. So here it is, in another form, because none of us has the attention span to read or write a book any more 😅… #wrestlingroses