Slave to the Roses

Here's my annual climbing rose complaint.
Way back when we first started a vegie garden down below our deck (one of the few flat spots in the yard), I thought it would be cool to have two climbing roses come up from the garden and twine in a lovely manner along the deck railings. I swear I'd seen such a set up in garden magazines, and it looked so effortless and beautiful.

Well, as usual reality is MUCH different than what is shown in a picture in a magazine.

The roses turned into monsters, overgrowing the vegie garden, making the deck unihabitable and unpassable, actually wrecking one of the deck boards by growing through it, and of course causing me many skin pricks and slashes while trying to tame this beast of a plant. I swear it looked like Sleeping Beauty's castle after she's been asleep for awhile. If you miss a week of trimming, the rampant growth takes advantage of your sloth and seems to expand double time.

But yet, there are the flowers.

After I hacked and slashed my way back into the vegie garden a couple weeks ago so that I could plant my tomatoes, basil and peppers, I had so many blooms that I gathered them all up into a vase in the house. And enjoyed them that way for a while. (you can see the still growing roses in the sunshine in the background).

I liked the shadows of the stems on the wood.

This picture looked like a marble to me.

And yes of course, the plants are still there. I just can't bring myself to dig them up and throw them out into the deer-infested front yard to hopefully thrive and grow up a redwood tree (I've seen that in a neighbors' yard, hmmm). So, I'll just complain about them every year, ok?

Unless my husband digs them up, then I'll be ok with that. I just can't do it myself.