Bees In A Tunnel Of Honey

The rain drops keep falling.....

 at The Royal Horticultural Society's Rosemoor Gardens at Great Torrington in North Devon this afternoon. A dear friend and I walk through the mist and rain, drenched in the floating perfume of a thousand roses blooming all around us, trying to keep our cameras dry.... pulled on and on into the next wide flourishing border and the next....soaking up the beauty like bees in a trumpet tunnel of honey.

 I know I've quoted them before in this blog, but these lines from Mary Oliver's poem Roses, Late Summer come back to me again and again whenever I'm in the company of roses.

.....And over one more set of hills,

along the sea,

the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.

If I had another life

I would want to spend it all on some

unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox or a tree

full of waving branches.

I wouldn't mind being a rose

in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.

Reason they have not yet thought of.

Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.

Or any other foolish question.