Roses

Roses, originally uploaded by Shertila Tony.

ROSES

I know a roadside where the wild rose blooms with a strange
abundance. There is a beauty in the blossoms too of an almost
exotic kind, a taint of deeper pink that shocks the Puritan flowers.
Two hundred generations ago (generations, I mean, of roses) this
was a village street; there was a floral decadence when they left their
simple life and the roses came from the wilderness to clamber round
houses of men.

Of all the memories of that little village, of all the cottages that stood
there, of all the men and women whose homes they were, nothing
remains but a more beautiful blush on the faces of the roses.

I hope that when London is clean passed away and the defeated fields
come back again, like an exiled people returning after a war, they may
find some beautiful thing to remind them of it all; because we have loved a little that swart old city.

~ Lord Dunsnay, Fifty-One Tales

(I got to looking for Lord Dunsnay thanks to http://string-alongs.blogspot.com/2007/06/green-man.html.)