Well, technically a moss rose is not a rose at all, it is portulaca (Portulacaceae (purslane Family)), but I have no idea, really, how to say that. So, they will remain Moss Roses to me. :):)I usually see these beautiful plants growing in dry-ish places. They also are rather short plants and I've seen them used as a kind of ground cover or a plant good for places where nothing else will grow. A couple of years ago I saw them growing here in Kherson for the first time. Maybe they have always been around, but it was the first time for me. I absolutely love these little plants and wish I had several pots growing on my balcony. Alas, I do not.
What is so special about them, you may ask? Good question! As is common in many things in life, the special-ness of them goes back to my childhood.
When I was around 2 years old my parents bought a house. It was a little gray house in a new part of Colorado Springs. In the front of the house was a big cement porch type thing. It had no roof and when I went back and looked at the house as an adult, it wasn't nearly as big as I remembered it being. Just a cement slab, two steps up from the ground at the end of a sidewalk and probably wide enough to set a chair on and watch the sun set over Pikes Peak in the hot summer evenings (we never did that, tho). At either end of this cement slab were two red brick planters. The planters were kind of like "book-ends" to the slab. In front of the planter on the right (looking toward the house) was a juniper tree, small when I was young but tall now, and on the other side of it was the driveway. On the not-cement-slab side of the left planter was a teeny little flower garden with a second juniper growing between the flowers and the yard next door.
Now, my mother was a very good mother, and one of the things good mothers did then - and now - was tell us kids that we could absolutely NOT play outside in the front yard without adult supervision. Forbidden! Big no-no. Even then, some 40+ years ago, my mother had a fear of us being kidnapped, run over when we decided to play in the street not on the grass, or just wandering off to explore the big world on our own. So, most of the time we (eventually) five kids played like good kids in the back yard.
As I got older, I was allowed to go out "on the porch." Sometimes it was to water the little flower garden and/or the plants in the planters. I don't remember there ever being any other flowers in the little garden other than grape hyacinths, but seeing as how they only bloom in the spring, there must have been others. Oh, there was a rose bush, too - my father always loved roses and loved to propagate them from cut flowers. He was actually quite good at getting them to grow.
One time my mother planted moss roses in the planters. The planters had to be watered several times a week due to their shape and shallowness and I got that wonderful job. I don't remember how many years moss roses actually grew in those planters - but in my memory, that's ALL that ever grew there from that point on.
I loved them. First - I had the freedom, as the oldest kid, to go out on the front porch when none of the other little kids got to - na, nana, nana!
Second, I have been very near-sighted since birth, and the height of the planters, coupled with the low growth of the plants made the perfect height for me to gaze at the plants "up close and personal." I spent long periods of time just looking at the blooms, the seed pods, the spikey leaves, the fleshy reddish stems. I got to know those moss roses very well.
Third, there is only one other plant that has blooms as beautiful as a moss rose bloom - prickly pear, barrel and other kinds of cacti. What? you may ask. What??? Nothing more beautiful than what?? Yep. If you have never done it, find a moss rose, preferably a magenta pink or yellow, and really look at it. (It helps to be really near sighted and need to put your nose practically in the bloom to actually see it.) Notice the color. Clear, clean, bright, pure, brilliant color. Some of the most beautiful shades in the world come in the blooms of moss roses and cacti. Hear a happy sigh.
Fourth, moss roses also have the most wonderful seed pods. Once the bloom has faded away, there is left this little nubbin that dries out over a couple days. It gets kind of a crackily shell which is really fun to squish between your fingers. Grasp, squeeze, crack, and teeny tiny seeds by the millions spill out into the dirt. Ok, not millions literally, but there are a lot of them. Not as many as a poppy, yes, but still a lot! However, if you squeeze that nubbin too soon, all that pops out are sticky white seeds in a clump. Not fun at all, so I learned patience, kind of, waiting for the seeds to ripen.
It seemed to me, in my childish lack of awareness of time, that I spent hours at a time looking at those flowers. I can remember leaning on the bricks for so long that my forearms got streaky red welts from their rough texture. Sometimes I would play in the dirt between the plants, or look for bugs. But mostly I just looked at the blooms and marveled at how beautiful they were.
Over the years (we moved from there when I was 17), the juniper tree grew tall and produced an abundance of berries. I loved to pick them and throw them at my siblings later, or use them to write messages and pictures on the cement slab. It was a very perfumy type of art. They didn't taste very good, though - we all tried them at one time or another. Hard to think they make gin out of them - well, considering what gin tastes like, maybe not so hard after all.
Because the porch was on the west side of the house, it was quite cool on summer mornings. After the morning dew had evaporated elsewhere, it was often still damp there. I was usually assured of finding a nice herd of rolly-polly bugs scattered around, just waiting to be played with (they were fun to throw at my little sisters, too, sometimes, but mostly we just loved to watch them curl up). And of course, a big old daddy longlegs would often come by to say hello.
Well, those are some of my memories of the front porch. It would be interesting to be able to go back in time and watch myself and see what it was really like. I wouldn't, though - the memories are too precious.
I love moss roses. I always will.
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