Notes from a small urban garden: on why I had my rose bushes removed

“When a tea-master has arranged a flower to his satisfaction he will place it on the tokonoma, the place of honour in a Japanese room. Nothing else will be placed near it which might interfere with its effect, not even a painting, unless there be some special aesthetic reason for the combination.” This passage comes from the flower chapter of Kakuzo Okakura’s Book of Tea. It has probably inspired my decision to have all my rose bushes recently removed. Now don't get me wrong. I adore roses. Especially since having visited, usually at dusk, the rose-gardened cemeteries of old neighborhood mosques in Istanbul some decades back. And yet, I’ve recently had all my large rose shrubs uprooted, and for several good reasons.

"If roses grew everywhere, we would no longer see them."

The primary driving factor had to do with all else "interfering with their effect". They competed visually with the vines behind them, a border to one side, and a free-standing pine to the other. Moreover, whenever I would crouch down and do some work on the neighboring flower border, the rose’s thorns would come close to tearing through my windbreakers, or worse, blinding me. A third reason was that roses tend to be high-maintenance, with respect to leaf burn and pests. I could have cut away the vines instead, but they attracted so many bees in spring and birds in winter, and they gave us some privacy in their leafier months and dazzled us with their shifting seasonal interest throughout the year. So it was the roses that had to go. And when they did, I was surprisingly pleased. An unobstructed view across rooftops opened up where the rose’s upper leaves had screened it. The flower border near it gained definition, and all the hard work put into it didn’t go lost in a jungle of competing plantings. In addition, I could then access a lush and hidden corner of red-tipped photinias reached by a narrow passage behind that solitary pine. A passage only cats could pretty much make use of until then.

Do I miss the roses? My neighbors have plenty. If roses grew everywhere, we would no longer see them. Okakura’s chapter on flowers concludes with a striking story in connection with the 16th-century tea master Rikyu and his renowned garden of morning glories. Morning glories were, at least in his day, rare in Japan. When the ruler Taiko (Toyotomi Hideyoshi) came to visit his tea master’s garden and see it for himself, he was dismayed to find the garden completely gravelled over and not a morning glory in sight. However, upon entering Rikyu’s tea house, he saw that placed on the tokonoma in an antique bronze vessel was the most exquisite morning glory, apparently cut from the tea master's garden…

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Source: Okakura, Kakuzo. The Book of Tea. Dover Publications, 1964.