I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

But you can have one anyway:

That's the Gold Medal Garden at the International Rose Test Garden in Portland.  There must be something wrong with me.  I'm a female, and yet ranks upon ranks of roses got hideously boring after the first twenty minutes.  Then again, when I hit their gift shop and screamed for joy upon finding rose lotion, rose air freshener, and rose lip balm, I suppose I shored up my creds.  But still.

Got a lot of pretty pictures of roses, I do admit.  And it was fun taking my camera's macro mode out for a good workout.  Join me after the jump for a few more.




No boring red roses for us, my darlings.  Let's have a touch o' sun on a cloudy day:

Reminds me of the lotus, this one does:

Lovely in lavendar:

Perhaps a Rhapsody in Blue (the only varietal name I cared to remember)?

I don't know why, but this one reminds me of flamenco:

And of course we have to have our pretty pink:

Now, this is why I love being a smoker: this tableau was tucked away in the parking lot, and I wouldn't have noticed it if I wasn't looking for something interesting to stare at while I indulged out of the way of others:

And I wouldn't have got a bee doing the pollination job:

Ah, there.  Now that I've stopped to smell the roses - well, metaphorically - I feel better about ye olde crap day at work.  A brief word to the wise: do not upgrade your snazzy phone's operating system until after the phone manufacturer has worked out the bugs, or you shall be as upset as 90% of the poor people I talked to today.  Instead of rushing right out to download the latest release guaranteed to make your phone do all sorts of things that sound great at the time but in retrospect could've waited a wee bit longer, do stop to ponder a bloom or two.  And while you do that, I'll just be getting back to all the geology homework I wasn't able to get done today...