Photos: Old-Fashioned Rose

 In the early 1960s, when I was very young, my mother cut clippings from her mother's rosebush on a farmstead near Arthur, North Dakota, and brought them home. I remember that they were wrapped in paper towels, and she made sure to keep them wet all the way back, some 455 miles. We had three big rosebushes from those clippings, on the east, south, and west sides of the house.

Years later, when my mother was in the hospital for what we knew was the last time, her house -- the house I grew up in -- was moved. In the dirt near the basement, I found a large root in one of the dormant flowerbeds.

I brought it home, divided it, and put the pieces into the ground around my yard.

Come spring, I found tiny red leaves poking up from each of those sites, and knew: It was my Grandma Winings' rosebush! I have grown three or four bushes from that one root.