The Turks are obsessed with rose gardening, and they’re good at it. A friend told me yesterday that it makes sense they would choose roses because there’s a lot of history there, that roses were first cultivated in the area that is now Turkey. I can’t seem to find anything online that confirms or denies this (though admittedly I didn’t spend much time looking). Can anyone fill us in?
In any case, I went out and took some photos of local roses a couple of days ago (small flickr set here), and it’s a good thing I did it when I did— last night we had the mother of all hail storms. It was the first time in four years of living here that I’d ever experienced hail in this country, and it was pretty violent. The streets were flowing with ice pellets. I’m afraid if I go down and look at the roses today, it’s going to be a sad sight.
Considering it’s almost May, we’re having weather more consistent with early March. After having packed away the duvet and the winter clothes a couple of weeks ago, I had to dig it all back out yesterday so that we wouldn’t freeze, and I had to bring the plants inside to protect them. I’m not particularly a global warming conspirator, but something is certainly going on, whether it be global warming, or a strange series of coincidences, or, from the looks of it, a coming ice age.