Rosehips

This morning, while waiting for a train, I was sitting on a bench in memory of someone or other. Just beside it, also in this person's memory, was a rose-bush that nobody cared for.

Let me tell you a bit about roses here. You and I, who plant the roses, believe that the purpose of the rose is to grow flowers. But the rose has other ideas. To the rose, a flower is only the means to the end of producing a rosehip, which is its seed; the irony, lost on the rose, is that all cultivated roses are infertile anyway. The rosehips don't fall for a season or so, and there won't be any new flowers there until they do. So one part of caring for a rose is to cut away the hips, or the "dead heads" as people sometimes call them. This rose had scores of hips, and clearly wasn't being looked after.



So I got my hands a bit bloody this morning, but there will be roses again in the summer. I couldn't help but be reminded of Jesus's claim to be the true vine, "...and my father is the gardener; every branch in me that bears no fruit he will remove, but every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be more fruitful." For me and for the rose, feeling the edge of the pruning knife means I'm doing something right.

Syndicated 2012-02-28 07:53:31 (Updated 2012-02-28 07:54:07) from Monument