THE CRANFORD ROSE GARDEN –

A SOURCE OF JOY AND INSPIRATION

I’ve been looking forward to a second trip to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Three years ago I had the opportunity to take a bus trip there with the Rhode Island Rose Society. The highlight of the tour was seeing their Cranford Rose Garden. While the day started out a little gray and misty, it turned out to be a wonderful source of digital photos – without a glaring sun overhead, which so often destroys the color in the images.

We saw many roses that were new to me, especially climbers and ramblers. For the most part, they were well labeled so they could be identified. As we know, this is a special treat to photographers since resulting pictures can have actual names on them – instead of image 001, image 002, etc.

Here are some of my favorites that were photographed, and a little that I dug up (pardon the pun!) about them:

Seven Sister rambler – a form of Rosa multiflora with similar growth. It can bear up to 7 flowers on each truss, ranging from deep cerise-purple to pale mauve to almost white, since it changes as it ages

Silver Moon climber – having semi-double creamy white flowers with an amber base and darker stamens

City of York – a climber with fragrant, creamy white flowers. It grows on an arbor in this garden, but can become a rambler covering fences and pergolas

Martine Guillot – a gorgeous buff pink of which I have four growing in my own garden around an obelisk

Bow Bells – with large deep pink clusters which are shaped like artichokes before opening into the cupped form

Complicata – which has bright clear pink single blooms with bright creamy yellow stamens

Knockout – at the garden, you can’t NOT notice it in the distance – it’s a glistening hot pink mass, planted as a huge hedge in a semi-circle around an island of grasses in a water feature

Dainty Bess – with soft rose pink single blooms with distinct maroon stamens

Distant Drums – a beautiful Buck rose

Cerise Bouquet – which is bright cerise with a light fragrance on strong branches

Carefree Beauty – a dependable reflowering disease resistant spreading shrub

Ballerina Tree Rose – this was just beautiful with several hundred small shallow-cupped light pink flowers, almost looking like hydrangea heads

Centenaire de Lourdes – a popular rose in Europe with large old fashioned soft rose flowers. It was voted one of the world’s top ten roses at the World Rose Convention in 1994.

Dairy Maid – a large single lemon-yellow rose with blossoms fading to white.

Shortly after that visit to the gardens and uploading all my pictures to the computer, a local quilt shop was having a quilt design challenge. The quilted item had to be smaller than 36x36 inches and the theme was "Summer Flowers". And what do you think would be my favorite summer flowers? I chose to do a photo quilt wall hanging using several of the pink roses from photos taken at the garden. Technology now allows us to print computer images directly onto fabric using a regular computer printer. So I created a design consisting of 9 blocks with flower images in their center and strips of pink and green batik material surrounding them. The quilting was done in a design that mimics rays of light shining through each block. Although it was not a winner in the challenge, it was such a joy to make.

With all the roses that will be seen on my next visit to the garden this June, there should be plenty more sources of inspiration. And if there are many new favorites, I may get ambitious enough to do a bed-size quilt this time!