Just back from France and the garden is sprawling with old-fashioned English roses, tumbling into the sunshine: Ophelia, Rosa mundi, Rambling Rector, William Morris, Albertine. I love their scents, soft, pale colours and heavy delicate petals that fall away in my hand… The novel I read on holiday couldn’t have been a better choice.
June brings roses. Roses that show carmine in the bud and open to reveal petals of the palest shell pink. Roses in every shade of white: ivory, cream, parchment, chalk, snow, milk, pearl, bone. Roses with nodding globular flowers, large as teacups.
The Rose Grower contains tales of unrequited love: a young doctor’s love for a self-effacing aristocratic woman; her secret love for a visiting American who has fallen in love with her married sister on recouperating from a ballooning accident.
Set against the background of the French Revolution, the novel follows the lives of those living in rural Gascony, caught up in the Reign of Terror, under which they have no control. Sophie’s passion to create a repeat-flowering crimson rose survives through the turbulent times in which they are living.
The end is inevitable… At eight o’clock the sun in the courtyard is like a blade.
The previous night they chalked a number on her door, so she knew that the footsteps would stop there this morning…
The Rose Grower is a sad, moving story I long to read once more. It is beautifully written and the writer’s descriptions are to be savoured time and again.
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