Queen is the top prize. As I learned when I traveled among the rose obsessed, many exhibitors will do almost anything to win it. I met an Ohio surgeon who persuades tight blossoms to open by warming them with his wife’s hair dryer; an Arizona lawyer who chastizes floribundas with a sharp shovel; a Minnesota potter who buries tender hybrid teas in deep pits during the winter.

Like Scheherazade, their darling tells a thousand tales, captivating us by adapting to our desire. She can be an unscented micro-mini that fits on an indoor window sill or a fifty-petal climber that envelopes the front porch in a swoon of fragrance. She is more geographically adaptable, appears in more sizes, colors, shapes and blossom types, and blooms over a longer period than any other flowering plant. It is almost impossible to resist the wiles of such a chameleon.

I no longer try. When I began this book, I grew two roses. Fifteen months later, I developed a list of the varieties that I cannot live without – thirty-five new plants. Too late, I realized that this is how it begins. © 2007 - Aurelia C. Scott

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CHAPTER 4 - ROSE SEX
“I HATED roses when I first came here. Did Keith tell you?” Debbie Vachuda whips a baby rose, roots flailing, from potting soil and drops it into a four-foot high plastic garbage can. “Hated them.” She uproots a pink-budded one...

CHAPTER 7 - ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL
“COMPETITIVE? Oh yeah, with just about everything. When I first got into roses, I got me a garden log. Inside the cover I wrote: ‘I love roses and I love the competition and I’m going to grow the best God damn roses I can.’”...

Virtual Privacy
WHILE watering her pink cleome one summer, my friend Susan heard her name mentioned on the neighbor’s side of a six foot fence that divides their backyards...

Roy Hennessey
WE KNOW that Roy Hennessey began his career as a union organizer on the Portland, Oregon docks. We know that by the 1920s, he had angered enough people that he was told to leave town or become fish food...

Talking with Garrison Keillor
EVERY morning, Garrison Keillor walks up two flights of stairs to his office at the top of the house, where he writes about -– well, that’s the question...

Talking with Jonathan Franzen
WHEN Jonathan Franzen spent Memorial Day weekend of 2006 recording his memoir “The Discomfort Zone,” he learned that “there’s a sweet two hours about fours hours into it when everything is working."...

Low Country Cruising in East Anglia
IT'S easy,'' the young man said, demonstrating the combination throttle and gear shift in our rented 12-foot electric boat. ''Forward, reverse, stop.''...

New England's Changing Garden Clubs
IF THE mention of garden clubs makes you think of leisured ladies in white gloves who discuss flower arranging while drinking tea from a silver service, think again...

Well Charted Territory
THE truth is that I may never again need the map of Los Angeles County that I used for three days in 1982...

When Nowhere is the Place to Be
UNPREPOSSESSING would be putting it mildly, although the intermittent drizzle through which we first saw the house may have dampened our spirits unfairly...