sunny: strong wind from northwest: 48ºF

No one’s taking turns. Roses, daylilies, irises, and peonies are all in bloom. To everything there is a season doesn’t apply this year. This botanical garden is like a wild three-ring circus -- no matter how hard I try to see it all, I'm bound to miss something.

Too bad about most roses. They look great, but they they’re hardly worth a whiff. That old cliché “wake up and smell the roses” may help in life, but out with the real roses it’s tough to find one that has any fragrance. This morning I wandered though one of the botanical garden’s rose gardens smelling the roses. For fragrance, the climbing roses were best. And of the climbing roses, the rose with deepest, richest, most satisfying old-fashioned rose scent was a hybrid climbing tea rose named ‘Etoile de Hollande’ (Bing translates it as ‘Star of Holland’). The rose’s id marker says that the rose was introduced in 1931 by Leenders. From an online search, I found that Mathias Leenders was a Dutch rose breeder who had a thriving nursery business in the Netherlands during the first half of the last century. ‘Etoile de Hollande’ is crimson. It’s so bright that I won't be able to take a good picture of it until there’s some cloud cover. Etoile's blossoms are big and stuffed so full of petals that I can bury my whole nose inside a bloom.

While I was in the rose garden, I came across a shrub rose named ‘Carefree Spirit.’ It was one of the All-America Rose Selections (AARS) winners in 2009. It is the only shrub rose grown without using fungicides to win the award. Carefree Spirit is just now starting to bloom in the rose garden here, but in a week of so it will be covered with hundreds of roses – brassy red on top and frosted on the back side. More than the rose’s color and its award though, I was more interested more in its name – ‘Carefree Spirit.’ It’s likely meant to imply that the rose will thrive without a lot of pampering. But to some, the name may mean have other meanings.

In the last few weeks the Wellington Botanical Gardens in New Zealand have asked people to stop spreading the cremated remains of their loved one in the botanical garden’s Lady Norwood Rose Garden. Keepers of the rose garden say that it’s upsetting to tend gardens beds where they find ashes and bits of bone, and also the remains are harming the roses because ashes contain a high concentration of phosphate which is not good for roses.

Not all of the Wellington’s roses are being targeted though. The heaviest concentrations of ashes are spread under roses with names such as ‘Lasting Love’ and ‘Remember Me.’ I’m hoping that what happens in New Zealand stays in New Zealand and that the earth beneath where the ‘Carefree Spirit’ roses are planted will stay just earth.

The remodeling of the entrance to this botanical garden that visitors would have used in 1859 is almost complete. The foyer has been has been transformed into a space for private receptions, meetings, and weddings. A bride’s room has been added and the public restrooms have been remodeled. I did a test run of the new restrooms this morning. Apart from the expected new fixtures, there was this – a fantastical art glass chandelier of botanically inspired glass blooms or leaves attached to chrome stems. This is a very classy place to take a pee.

The Japanese Garden is the place to see peonies. Edging one of the walkways is a wide border of all kinds of peonies. What kinds? Here in this garden intended for meditation and contemplation of nature, nothing is labeled. Still, whatever its name might be, this peony was my favorite this morning.