Do Rose Bushes suffer from Vertigo?

My mother is disappointed that she has two children and neither one has a green thumb.  She’s a Master Gardener and Not. One. Child. has taken to it.  Don’t get me wrong I like flowers and plants,  they just don’t like me.  

The running joke is that flowers and plants come to my house to die.  So herein lies the mystery,  if I have a black thumb in gardening then why do my roses bloom wildly and without abandon.  Why? I’ll tell you why.  Magic!  Every so often I’ll send my mom a picture of my budding and blooming roses with the caption “Magic”.  And to be honest, I really did think it was.  I don’t water them. I don’t feed them; I don’t prune or pluck them. I just let them be. I planted them from newborn stalks and never touched them and now I’ve got bushes and bushes of bodacious blooming buds!  I  even have a volunteer stalk!   When I showed my mother, the master gardener, a picture of it she said it was a dud and needed to be clipped.  Whell, I didn’t and it is one of my most productive blooming stalks!  Now when she comes over I make a point to tell the stalk that my mother wanted me to abort it. 

It wasn’t until my claim to fame of passive gardening was thwarted when a neighbor was having her yard re-landscaped and her contractor stopped me and said “did you know that the outside water faucet (the one attached to the house) is leaking?”.  Bingo!  That’s why they’re blooming and bursting at the seams with botanical abandonment.  Just like a newly de-virginized teenager, they’re getting their fill 24/7 and who knows how many months (or years?) that has been going on!?

So now that mystery is solved.  My next gardening mystery is that when I re-landscaped my house, I  bought two varieties in three bushels.  Two were your standard white rose while the third was purchased because it was advertised as a climber and I had visions of a rose bush climbing up the side of the porch and creeping along the top in a curtain of delightful smells. Has that happened? No.   It’s a dud. It’s been there for over  7 years and although it produces some delightful plumage, it has done nothing but grow OUT not UP.  I tried tying it to the post and it refused to go.  I tried whispering sweet nothings and it thinks I’m a “player”. I’ve shown it pictures of what it’s supposed to do and it just scoffs at me.  It’s almost as if the “climber” is a floral representation of myself, someone who throughout the years may not be growing up but out.  So, I’m only left to wonder…is it possible for climbing roses to have vertigo?

Now, if you ever experienced vertigo, you’d know that it’s scary, debilitating, and just how sudden it can come on.  I suffered from it for six years daily.  Episodes would range from a slight misstep to full-blown falling down after I turned my head ever so slightly. I’ve been to several doctors whose remedies included an exercise done by sitting on the end f a bed with my head dangling down then moving my head side to side, a prescription medicine that would make me even dizzier, and one doctor just said to suck it up.  I wasn’t going to take this or the other suggestions as an end-all-be-all.  Over the years, I’ve studied the condition and have discovered it’s not just environmental on the outside, but it’s what’s going on inside my body that triggers episodes.  I know that if I eat a certain food, I will most likely have an episode and the intensity of that episode is directly correlated with how my food is prepared and how much I ate.   For example, If I eat popcorn lightly seasoned, I might experience an episode that same day or the next day; but if I eat that same popcorn with a little ghee sprinkled on top (not butter), it provides that grounding property that helps vertigo subside.  Raw salads, chips, and anything dry will also cause an episode.  Why?  For me, my vertigo is brought on by excessive dryness.  Eating foods with drying qualities like popcorn, chips, or cold salads translates into drying out of the body.  To combat this, eating cooked foods with a little ghee that have a little bit more earth-like quality can prevent these episodes from happening.

So why is my rose bush suffering from vertigo?  Could it be that it’s in a space where it gets too much sunlight and not enough water?  I’m going to experiment and see what happens and will report back.  Stay tuned…