Roses from my grandparents’ garden.
A childhood remembered.
And a small piece of it growing here now.
Last summer, I wrote just a few lines about these roses.
Years later, thanks to my uncle, some of those roses found their way to me.
Eventually, I brought them here.
To a completely different garden.
To a home that didn’t even exist during those childhood summers.
In 2025, they bloomed here for the first time
Roses from my grandparents’ garden.
Passed on by my uncle.
This summer, they opened.
Some things travel quietly through generations.
And bloom again.
A year later, they are still here.
And this summer, they have already bloomed twice.
Maybe that is why I started thinking less about the roses themselves and more about where they came from.
A garden from another time
My grandparents’ house was simply part of childhood.
We spent our holidays there. There was the garden, familiar rooms, familiar smells and all those ordinary things you never think you will remember decades later.
And there were Sundays.
Every Sunday, the family would gather for lunch. Everyone around one table.
At the time, there was nothing remarkable about it. It was simply what Sundays looked like.
What family looked like.
As a child, you don’t think about these moments disappearing one day. You don’t know that the ordinary things will eventually become the ones you remember most.
Years pass. Families change. Houses change. Gardens change.
And somehow, some things remain.
The roses came with us
My uncle passed some of those roses on to us.
Eventually, they found their way here.
To a completely different garden.
To a home that didn’t even exist during those childhood summers.
There is something strange about seeing flowers you remember from another part of your life growing outside your own door.
They belong here now.
They grow among the things we have planted ourselves, in a place that is slowly collecting its own stories.
But they still carry a little piece of somewhere else.
Things we don’t know we’re keeping
Perhaps that is why I like them so much.
Not because they are particularly rare roses.
And not really because of the flowers themselves.
They remind me how much of our past travels with us without us noticing.
A garden.
Summer holidays.
Sunday lunches.
A table surrounded by people who, at the time, you simply assumed would always be there.
Small things that seemed completely ordinary then.
And somehow became precious later.
This summer, the roses bloomed once.
Then they bloomed again.
Maybe some things don’t disappear completely.
They simply find another place to grow.
