30 thoughts on “roses ~ wild and cultivated”

      1. I don’t blame you for that Barbara. They were beautiful. There’s a very old graveyard about four miles from here and they have these rambling wild roses along the wrought-iron fence. The cemetery was established in 1869 and some of those rosebushes have to be at least a century old.

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        1. Wow — that’s amazing! Do you have any pictures of the ancient roses on your blog? They must be so pretty and smell wonderful in the summer.

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        2. No, but I should stop there … I pass it when I go to Wyandotte to the River. What keeps me from going there are no maintenance/groundskeepers for the cemetery. A few people volunteer to mow but when I was last there, the grass was very high and unkempt. There are no current graves there, just those from well over a century ago.

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          1. I don’t blame you for avoiding the cemetery — who knows what is lurking in the unmown grass?

          2. At the dedication of Humbug Marsh last year, Congressman Debbie Dingell was there. Her late husband, Congressman John Dingell, spearheaded the campaign to turn this last part of pristine land on the Detroit River into this wildlife sanctuary. So, on that day she was a little misty-eyed and about to speak when she spotted a snake in the grass by her feet. I thought it was an oddity, but when I made my first trip there a few weeks later, I learned that the Eastern Fox Snake is one of the regular inhabitants of the marsh and forest area. I’m not so keen on walking around there so much now. I stayed on the cement trail the last time I was there and I was on high alert. Those snakes are three to five feet long.

          3. Yikes! I looked up pictures of eastern fox snakes. At least they are non-venomous. And they are only found in your region and are endangered. Keep to those paths, my friend! I think I would jump out of my skin if I came across one, they are so huge…

          4. I’ve never seen a snake out on the trail Barbara and like you, I’d jump out of my skin too. I went in the backyard yesterday morning to see if there was any damage from our severe weather. I wanted to ensure nothing was stuck in the A/C before I turned it on. There was a huge possum in my yard – I do not live in a rural area! It looked at me and kind of ambled away. It wasn’t happy to know a possum is running around in my small yard. (Although I read each possum eats 5,000 ticks per season!)

          5. I’ve had a few little garter snakes slither across my path over the years, but I’m used to them as they used to live in the stone walls my father built and would come out to sun themselves. But they’re small! I have heard that opossums are good at eradicating ticks, but it must be unsettling having one so close to your house. Once my friend and I came across a skunk in the middle of the city where we were walking along the sidewalk. It can be startling! And now people around here are finding bears in their yards…

          6. I’ve not come face to face with a snake – small or otherwise and for someone who does not deal well with centipedes or spiders, I’d be pretty terrified. A friend of mine who lives in Virginia had a robin build a nest on her back porch. It was a small porch and she passed the nest often to let the dogs out in the backyard. She took pictures with her phone daily as they grew and sent them to me; they were 12 or 13 days old, just a few days from fledging. I posted their growth in my blog. My friend came home to find a five-foot black snake attacking the nest … he got all but one of the chicks. She saw the mother robin push the chick into the bushes, but they could not find it. But my friend took a nearby garden rake, picked up the five-foot snake, dropped it into a big flowerpot, put a garbage lid on top, then carried it down the street to a wooded area. I’d have fainted on the spot! The meteorologists on my all-news station are based near State College, Pennsylvania. One remarked on the air one day about a bear visiting the neighborhood and regularly slurping nectar from his hummingbird feeder and he caught it on his home surveillance system. 🙂

          7. I have a bad spider phobia, too. Sigh…. How sad about the five-foot snake and the robin chicks. Nature can be so brutal. I’m not sure what I would have/could have done about the situation if I was in your friend’s shoes! I encountered a bear once in the woods on a trail at Shenandoah National Park. I was with a group of women so I wasn’t too scared. It was busy turning over logs, looking under them for food, I presume, and ignored us. I even moved closer to it to get a picture with my little pocket camera. What was I thinking??? (The beginnings of my obsession with nature photography.)
            https://www.ingebrita.net/2010/02/changes/

          8. I enjoyed seeing that photo Barbara and the post. Now I know who inspired you to begin a blog. In my case it was my neighbor who kept sending me blog posts to read from a woman blogger in Scotland. She’d say “you can do this – do it!” You were lucky the bear was preoccupied with food, but it was a great shot!

          9. So happy your neighbor encouraged you to start your blog and that you’ve kept with it over the years! It’s fun looking back at old posts…

          10. I am too Barbara – at the time she passed that post about the Scotland heather fields, I really wasn’t ready to cave in to her insistence, but I sure am glad I did.

    1. “Each thing —
      each stone, blossom, child —
      is held in place.”
      ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
      I love roses, and poetry about place…

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