Rose Mystery

We spent a whole bunch of time and resources over the past month or so creating a rose garden in our back yard. We built a retaining wall - each bag of crushed rock and each block individually carried from the store to our truck to our yard... We schlepped dirt. We shopped for roses; we planted, smoothed, mulched and watered them. What I'm trying to say here is that it was really quite a lot of effort.

But then we had buds coming up on all 5 of the new rose bushes. We thought, last Thursday night, that the first bud should be open on Friday. I came home from work Friday afternoon and rushed out to the back yard with the camera, to take a picture. A new rose. A very big deal for us. What color will it be? Will it be fragrant? I expected it to be wonderful.

What I didn't expect it to be was Gone. But gone it was.

Someone came into our backyard and stole our first rose! Cut it off the cane with a clean diagonal cut. And the cane next to it, with other almost-ready buds, as well. No animal footprints, no stray petals or leaves that might have suggested one of our raccoons had taken a shine to Rose Lunch. Clearly a deliberate act.

The creepiness factor here is pretty high. Who would do such a thing? Who even knew there was a rose to be had in our back yard? The garden can't be seen from the street - or anywhere besides from our own house (almost.) Even though the gate to the back yard was broken (it is fixed now) it is on the side of the house, quite far from the roses. The roses can't be seen until you get pretty far into the yard itself, around the corner of the house.

Quite naturally the question of 'who did it' doesn't want ignoring. Mark is voting for our neighbor - who acted as outraged as we were when she heard about it. (He comes from a world a bit more populated with 'characters' than the one I've lived in - otherwise nice-seeming ladies who shoplift beeswax candles and call anonymously to cancel airline reservations of 'friends' with whom they are feuding - and consider this perfectly acceptable behavior.) And she did offer a perfectly implausible explanation - that deer can come into your yard, even though they never have before, and munch on a single rose, leaving behind no footprints or mess. These neighbors are, literally, the only ones who could have seen the rose garden. And we adore them. It just can't be.

In any case the mystery is probably unsolvable, but we can put it behind us (now that the gate is fixed, at least) and concentrate on the other wonderful buds that were allowed to come to bloom. Like this one, for example.