Last and best is my heart's joy—the white rose of my childhood.
It has never revealed to me the secret of its botanic name; I simply know it as the "White Rose."
Fifty years ago its sister roses might have been found in many dooryards—side by side with ragged pink cinnamon roses—thriving untended, loaded with bloom, and covering the low fronts of roadside farm-houses. Its flowers are lovely in form, with creamy petals, and just the faint suspicion of a blush at their heart.
Its odor is all its own—a strong, chaste, wholesome scent, yet sweet withal as the "honey of Hymettus."
All my life long it had been the desire of my heart to have a bush of this old-time white rose in my very own garden. Time after time I had bought and planted it, but to watch it die; at last, when half a century of my life had gone, it surprised me in the Cambridge garden! The bush had evidently seen its best days, and when we moved to The Lilacs opinions varied as to the wisdom of transplanting so old a settler. We could but try, and so we tried and succeeded. The big scraggly bush is (ten years after) bravely holding its own, and summer after summer scantily bearing the same dear old roses. A second bush, propagated from the parent root, has been put in our Mt. Auburn burying lot. It is one of my idle fancies to have a white rose tree near my grave. Surely when "petals of its blown roses" fall upon the grass above my head
"My heart will hear them and beat
Tho' lain for a century dead."
And now it is on my conscience that, in this authentic history, I have not yet confessed my disgraceful failure with Perpetual Roses. In the little bed, started ten years ago, but six decadent specimens now "hold the fort."
I cannot state whether this shameful fact is the result of unfitness of soil, mistaken pruning, insufficient winter protection, or simply the malice of opposing Fate.