In Risa Bear’s “French Pink,” a gardener recounts the life of a rose. Two French pink climbers now stand on either side of a gate, twined over an arch of willow, their scented velvet blooms full of small spiders. But they began as one plant. After a storm washed away the family’s original garden, she moved the surviving rose to a shaded north wall. It found water but not enough light, so it stretched toward the roof and sent out awkward shoots. Finally she dug it up, split it with a bow saw, and replanted both halves beside a sunny gate, where she can watch them from her kitchen window. The mood is quiet and patient. There is tenderness in her attention to roots, thirst, and light, and a sense of a relationship built on persistence and second chances—hers and the rose’s.
French Pink — Summary
There are two climbing roses by her gate, one to each side, with velvet blooms, small, but heavily scented, suitable for soaps, salves and potpourri. They blossom out together, several hundred, perhaps a thousand whorls French pink, shading to cream, the haunt of matching shy arachnids. How tall they'd grow she doesn't know, having twined an arch of willow whips atop her gate, to bind them to.
In her middle years, her family took this place and named it for the stony creek, dry in summer, rolling through between house and garden. A storm year came; that garden up and vanished down a river to the sea, leaving them three dead plum trees and a rose.
She started fresh, by the house. For the rose she chose north, a shaded wall, and while the bush liked a hidden spring there, for drinking, it never cared for the paucity of light. It'd stretch its greeny fingers roofward, up and over; send roots drilling left and right; make awkward shoots. Shift it one more time, she thought. Maybe both sides of a sunny gate she'd build, with an arch. The spot she had in view she could muse on from her kitchen window.
Again two days of digging, and with her bow saw made one rose two. Would they take another journey? It seemed they would, though they'd always want water; She'd have to remember to make the hoses reach. She wouldn't mind if the roses wouldn't mind.