A surprising twist to our rose's winter blooms

I wrote a little while ago about Max's Camelia plant, which bloomed on his six month anniversary, much to mine and his daddy's wonder and surprise. It is still flowering beautifully, though the flowers are delicate and easily blown off with the wind and rain. We've given it some shelter on our doorstep and we hope to see it growing more delicate pink flowers. I've seen some magnificent, established Camelias in people's gardens lately and they always catch my eye.

What we didn't expect was for our rose to bloom again in the middle of winter! We were getting ready to prune it, as we'd been told to do by the gardening experts, when we noticed that it seemed to be budding again. Lots of new buds grew full and in the last week two of them have bloomed into the most gigantic, spectacular roses! If this was not surprising enough, the roses that bloomed are pink, when in Summer they were white!

The mysterious dusky pink bloom

As neither Leslie nor I have green thumbs, we are at a loss to explain this second bloom or change of colour, but we are enjoying looking at the flowers while we can.

If anyone can offer an explanation as to this strange and wonderful phenomenon, we'd love to hear it! In the meantime, enjoy these lovely photos of Max's very healthy rose bush.