Mother loved roses. I think the main reason that she liked them so much was that her mother grew many different varieties of roses, and her sister owned a flower shop that specialized in arranging roses into magnificent displays. Dad could grow anything, so when mother requested a rose bush, Dad got busy in picking out just the right variety to plant in just the right spot on one end of the house. Grandmother always purchased her roses from Jackson & Perkins, so Dad obtained one of their catalogues and started the selection process.

Mother tended to like yellow roses and white roses, but in looking over the catalogue she made the choice of one of Jackson & Perkins’ most showy red roses. I seem to remember that it was called the Abraham Lincoln rose and from the picture of it in the catalogue it appeared to have rich red blossoms that looked as though they had been cut out of the finest red velvet cloth available.

Dad immediately ordered the selection and then started talking with his friends at the station about how to best plant the bushes. They told him that he would need to have trellises and that the soil preparation was one of the most important aspects of growing healthy roses. In anticipation of the arrival of the bushes, special preparations were made as though we were expecting some important out of town guests.

The area where the three rose bushes were to be planted was carefully selected for the right sun exposure and drainage. Mother wanted them planted on one end of the carport where the driveway wrapped around the house. The rose bushes could then be seen from the house and from the driveway. Dad carefully cleared away all of the other plants that had been growing in that area and then started preparing the soil.

Normally Dad would have tilled the soil and then added some rich wood’s dirt together with some of his favorite type of fertilizer and worked all of that into the area. But someone at the station told him that roses liked to grow in cow manure. Since the roses were something that Dad really wanted to have succeed and since we had a bountiful supply of cow manure from the farm, Dad dug out all of the soil from the side of the carport and replaced it with fresh manure from the farm.

We thought that it was very funny mainly because we didn’t have to help in the transportation of the manure but also because now that end of our house smelled like a cow barn. But mother didn’t seem to mind saying that it was simply the price that you had to pay to have great roses.

When the roses arrived, Dad took great pains to carefully plant the thorny stems attached to dried clumps of roots in the manure. As though expecting them to immediately grow beyond reason, three beautiful redwood trellises were purchased and placed behind the small brown stems of the rose bushes in anticipation of having healthy growth and many blossoms.

Dad talked with his friends at the station and was told that he had done a great job in his preparations but that it was probably all in vain. His friends told him that last year none of the roses in town had done very well because of a rather virulent strain of mite that had gone through the entire crop of roses and had pretty much reduced everyone’s bushes to nothing more that sad looking thorny stems.

I always wondered why his friends didn’t tell him about the mites before he hauled in the truckload of manure but had an idea that it was some sort of station humor that I didn’t fully understand. But Dad wasn’t deterred from the project in the least. He was used to dealing with the fact that insects liked to eat on crops. And he knew exactly what worked for every sort of insect that existed in our part of the world…bean dust.

Dad had an old and very reliable bean duster that no one was ever allowed to touch except him. It was kept always fully loaded and mounted above the door on the inside of his workshop so that it could be brought into use in a moment’s notice. After Dad found out about the Marietta rose mite menace, a day did not pass that the poor little rose bushes were not subjected to a heavy coating of bean dust. That end of our house now smelled like fresh manure and bean dust each and every day. The vast quantity of bean dust tended to get on mother’s car so that as we rode through town we appeared to be dusting everything in sight. But mother didn’t complain because she knew that if there was one thing that Dad could do, it was to grow things.

As funny as the manure and the bean dust seemed to be to us and as many jokes as we made about the new rose project, we could not help but notice that the roses seemed to be growing at an amazing rate. Maybe it was because of the care in the soil preparation or maybe it was due to the constant coating of bean dust or maybe it was just because Dad could always grow anything, but before long we had some of the most magnificent red velvet roses that I have ever seen anywhere.

The vines and leaves were kept constantly white with bean dust, but the huge red blossoms covered the trellises and their fragrance soon overpowered the smell of the manure and even the bean dust.

God’s grace overpowers all. God’s love is evident in our lives even when we think that it could never be seen above everything else that seems to be so prominent in our day to day existence. The radiance and magnificent beauty of Christ’s love and our Savior’s undying hope and faith in us overshadows all that we do. The fragrance of the peace of God always prevails.

Thank you, Lord, for the fact that faith in you never fails to blossom.

God Bless,
Dan