Some of you might remember this. A lovely early December dinner party with close friends. The sweetheart roses weren’t expensive: $9 a bunch, but worth millions in early winter cheer. And those silly cordial glasses we never use made great vases for them.
Orange sweetheart roses lined up with candles on my December table.
The next day, I cut the stems (remember, with roses you need to cut the stems under water, to keep air bubbles from forming), refreshed the water and placed all the little vases along my kitchen window sill. They warded off early winter chill.
A window-sill of orange cheer.
And now it’s March and the dried roses (I hung them upside down from the basement clothesline for a few weeks in little bunches fastened with elastics) are still adding beauty – a great return on investment! Check out the orange hypericum berries — now a dramatic black. And look what happened when the roses died: the orange died with them. That would be all those flavonoids giving up the ghost. But I do like crimson-pink. Especially in March when the first snowdrops are still weeks away.
The sweetheart roses in March.