This is the reigning queen of our garden, a rose called Belinda's Dream. She is certainly worthy of both her royal status and name, wouldn't you agree? Truthfully, I never used to like pink roses all that much, just thought they were way too foo-foo and fluffy. I guess I can honestly say that I don't really like much that is pink, roses or anything else for that matter. Pink represents to me everything about women that is soft and, I guess from my perspective, weak. (No offense to anyone out there who likes pink; this is just my opinion which is probably worth diddly squat in the general scheme of things.)
My mind changed about pink roses in the blink of an eye when I saw that first bursting, luscious bloom on our rose bush that my husband and I worked so hard to plant. It was just gorgeous and the fact that it was growing in our garden (a place where I tend to kill things off on a regular basis with seemingly little effort - but perhaps that is the core of the problem) made it even more spectacular. I also gained a new respect for pink roses and the color pink the first time I attempted to trim that nasty Belinda. She is a thorny warrior just waiting to pierce anyone who decides to mess with her. Soft and weak, Belinda is certainly not.
What's kind of funny about the name of our rose bush is that I am often mistaken for Belinda. For some reason, the name "Brenda" is difficult for surprisingly many people to understand, and instead they hear "Belinda." I can't tell you how many times I've been called Belinda over the course of my lifetime. And I always hated the name. Thought it sounded silly. Who the heck puts a "Be-" on "Linda"?? How does that make any sort of sense?
So, both the color pink and the name Belinda have really grown on me (please excuse the garden pun) since I've been in ownership of the awesome Belinda's Dream and seen it flourish in our backyard (once again, without me doing much of anything to help it along, and it hasn't died!).
I wish all gardening were that easy. Gardening and I have a love/hate relationship. I love to see plants that I've put into the ground grow and bloom, but I hate the work that is involved. In fact, I hate all aspects of gardening: the dirt, the bugs, and the physical labor. Yes, I am a total girly-girl.
I guess you could say that it is my dream to one day enjoy gardening and be good at it. The fact that I don't do either of those things is quite an embarrassment for me, because both my parents and my husband's parents are avid gardeners who all have beautiful yards and gardens that are painstakingly taken care of and loved. My husband and I pale considerably in comparison.
A few weeks ago, though, my guy and I completely redid our front yard landscaping (which was very pathetic looking, let me tell ya') in the course of a weekend. I had wanted to do so for a while but could never convince Kurt (who I think hates yard work even more than I do) to help me, and I knew I couldn't do all of the digging and planting by myself. Finally, after much harassment on my part for, oh, I'd say YEARS, he agreed. I think what did the trick is that I threatened to hire a professional landscape company to come out and do it at the cost of $2,000. This may sound outrageous to you (and it did to us too), but professional landscaping is the norm in Texas. Practically no one here does their own mowing or gardening. With both of us being from the Midwest, we find it an odd phenomenon. Neither of us has stooped to that low in 11 years of living here in our house. Coming from hearty German stock on both sides, we just could never bring ourselves to do it; Germans love to garden, our parents are gardeners, and we knew we should be too. So, we cheated a bit. I had a landscaping company come to our house, make us a landscaping plan, and then we went out and bought all of the plants and planted them ourselves. It was a ton of work, but we did it at a cost of a few hundred dollars instead of two thousand.
Now, after a couple of weeks, some of the plants are starting to grow and bloom, and our front yard actually looks quite nice. In fact, our yard looks so welcoming and pleasant, it's a dream come true...Brenda's Dream.
beautiful picture
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