Mountain Roses Open the First Chapter of a Romantic Garden

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Thanks to the author [Mr. Pirate] for theoriginal submissionsharing

Edited and compiled by: Baike Jun

Location: Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province

PLANET

 3ラムジ

ラムジ 

00:00/04:03

It poured rain in the afternoon. After finishing up some of the work on hand, I sat down to rest in my beloved boutique area, sipping Sprite while delightedly admiring pot after pot of my favorites, lost in this romantic garden sea of roses.

I have been growing roses and succulents for quite a few years now. From the earliest succulent newbie to a small-scale grower today, I cannot help but feel mixed emotions. Everyone's journey into the rabbit hole is different, with countless variations, yet all roads lead to the same place. At first, I was just bored minding the shop. One time while browsing "Mogujie" or "Meilishuo," my eyes accidentally landed on all kinds of adorable little succulents, and my enthusiasm surged instantly. It just so happened that my dad was idle at home at the time, and deep down he quite enjoyed fussing over plants and flowers, except he could never bring himself to buy them. So within half a month, we successively splurged on dozens of kinds of succulents. I vaguely remember the first pot was a Mountain Rose cluster (actually just the most ordinary and common Greenovia aureum cluster) bought from a well-known e-commerce platform.

By a stroke of luck (actually because we fell into the hobby in autumn and winter), in the spring and summer of the following year, as a newbie, my dad and I were amazed to discover that almost all our Echeveria, including but not limited to Echeveria 'Haleyna,' Echeveria 'Queen Sasa,' Echeveria 'Violet Queen,' Echeveria 'White Phoenix,' Echeveria 'Bluebird,' Echeveria laui, Echeveria 'Furong Snow Lotus,' Echeveria 'Chihuahua,' Echeveria 'Little Red Coat' and more, either up and died on us for no reason at all, or grew more and more leggy and ugly. Only the roses, at the tail end of that spring, truly stunned us with their beauty!

From then on, after clearing out all the leftover soil and empty pots from the various Echeveria, I sank irretrievably into the big pit of roses (along the way I also once obsessed over Sempervivum, even collecting them from countries all over the world). When my dad saw the roses on the rooftop shoot up from dozens or a hundred or so to over a thousand, he scolded me lightly, but was not displeased. In fact, when spring warmed the air and the fragrant roses filled the garden with romance, he felt quite a sense of accomplishment.

Back then, I frequently hung out in QQ groups, Tieba forums and Xianzhenyuan, and made a whole bunch of good friends. Because once my collector's temperament kicked in, the yard ended up with almost every rare and uncommon variety. My dad even specially built a small greenhouse on the rooftop just for growing roses. For a while, quite a few rose enthusiasts came over drawn by its reputation, and the plants were often snapped up in a rush.

Compared with the mainstream Korean overseas shopping mode of that time, domestic suppliers of premium roses were still few and far between, and almost all were the same ordinary Mountain Rose clusters. The silly things I did back then included:

1. Drooling every day over that rose with variegated cresting priced at 180W Korean won on the Korean website. Even if I could not afford it, just feasting my eyes was nice;

2. Often searching keywords like "Mountain Rose," "Egg Rose" or "Variegated Rose," carefully sifting through Taobao page by page, scrolling all the way to nearly a hundred pages, and even being able to accurately tell how many more pages a keyword had today than yesterday;

3. Worshiping the expert posts in the Rose Tieba forum for a long time, carefully looking up all kinds of information, memorizing the Latin names of each variety, and going through the German RP official website materials to improve and learn;

4.…………

And so on and so forth. I found that when this addiction of mine flared up, it was really no less intense than those born in the 80s and 90s. Until the yard could no longer hold my roses; until the official website materials had been read by me threadbare; until every variety available domestically had been obtained; until I discovered that the "feed succulents with succulents" model after careful selection actually had decent returns.

And so, a tiny, tiny wish was born: to wholeheartedly build a truly large-scale, professional rose garden of my own! To satisfy the collecting cravings and luxurious enjoyment of the vast community of rose fans in China. This is the opening chapter of "Romantic Garden."

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This article isexclusively authorizedby the author to the WeChat public account: Succulent Plant Encyclopedia (ID: duoroubaike). The article content does not represent the views or stance of the public account

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