Mrs. Rosenbloom

Everytime I go into Oak Harbor, I drive right by the local Funeral Parlor there. The side facing the main street has a row of the most beautiful, well tended rhododendrons there that are as tall as the building. I have admired them for years and years. When you can afford a gardener, I guess your plants would be beautiful.

In my yard I planted 5 rhodies when I first bought the house 13 years ago. Only one of them has survived, and it is scrawny. Sends out pretty purple blooms though. Or are they red? As I stated several weeks ago, My favorite Rhodie is the pink one with the darker pink center. I had two of those and both of them died.

I have quite a few roses too, but not as many as I used to have, My renters let them die. The ones I have out front are doing spectacular this year, although they are very overgrown and need trimming badly, I am afraid to touch them for fear of harming their bloom. Out back I had 30 Hybrid teas that are now down to two. There are five roses that come up every year back from their root stock, not the hybrid, but the one seems to have survived, and is a really light pink with a tinge of darker pink on the inside.

What I really need is a good nursery man to come out and tell me what to feed my plants with and how to amend the soil for healthy growth.

About 6 years ago, I had to go back to Georgia to the Naval Supply School in Athens for training. I was there for three weeks, and got to meet several of my counterparts from New York. One was a guy named Bob who was the Safety officer for NEXCOM at Staten Island, And we got to talking about gardening and roses and rhodies. Our weekends we would take off and head for some botanical garden or another and we learned a lot about plants.

He was a firefighter/paramedic in his down time with a volunteer force on Long Island. During his off hours, to keep his knowledge current he worked at the local funeral home helping with the embalming and the preparing the dead for burial or cremation. I asked the question what did they do with the people who died and had no family.

Bob looked at me, and said well, there are actually quite a few of them and burying them was getting expensive, so if they have no next of kin, we cremate the remains. He said that it was his job to take them down to the river and scatter them reverently over the water, and bring the empty containers back to the funeral parlor.

We talked some more about plants and family and work. I told him about my plants, and he said ..."Do you know I name my plants." When I asked why, he said, "well, I thought it was an awful waste of bone meal and ashes to throw these people in the river, so I took the ashes home and buried them under a plant. I name the plant after the person...You should see Mrs. Rosenbloom. She is a gorgeous red floribunda."

Guess I know how those rhodies at the Oak Harbor funeral parlor got so gorgeous...I wonder if they are named. Makes ya think...

TRUE STORY FOLKS!!!