Picture experiments

This is one of those pictures where you say "oh my, she has flowers growing out of her head!"

For Mother's Day this year, my husband bought me one of those little miniature rose plants that stores usually sell that time of the year. Now usually, the plants end up dying off after they bloom, no matter what you do for them, and they usually have no scent to them. This particular plant went through all the blooming and dropping off of leaves. I decided to try to re-pot it any way. So when I started to pull the plant out of its teeny little pot, it fell into four separate pieces. Now most of the leaves had already turned brown and dropped off. And the four pieces; turns out what someone had done was simply put four little slips, which did have a few blooms on them, into a pot, all very close together so that it actually looked like one complete plant.

I went ahead and re-potted them any way. I put one piece by itself in a ceramic pot, and put the other three twigs into a clay pot. I put a little steer manure in with them and put them in my backyard. My backyard gets some nice afternoon sun, as well as shade. I really didn't think that the plants- no, starts- would do well. Any time that I have tried to keep a miniature rose it's always died.

Between my husband and I, we managed to keep them watered once in a while, and then one day I noticed that most of the leaves had dropped off. The single start at one time only had one leaf left, and the group in the other pot didn't have much more. But soon after that small little leaves started coming in. By June 1st, each start had a respectable amount of leaves on it. Then last week I noticed that there were some buds on the little things. In the last few days, the single plant had one beautiful bloom on it, and the other group was covered in buds and open roses. So of course I cut a few and put them in my teeny weeny vase. The vase here is about 2 and a half inches tall. You can see how small the roses are. They have a nice delicate fragrance, which I love. Some of the newer roses, miniature and regular size, have no fragrance to them anymore. What good is a rose without the rose smell?

No matter how hard or how many times I try, the pictures I upload always end up at the top of the post. I wanted them interspersed throughout, but blogger's not letting me have my way. LJ lets me put pictures when ever I want, but if I try to put a widget in the sidebar, it goes in as a separate post. Strange.