A Wild Rose

This morning I saw a pretty five petal single rose in the garden. As this was nothing like the double roses now flowering exuberantly I wondered where it had come from.

Those of you who have followed this blog will know that all the plants, flowers, shrubs and other inhabitants of our garden have a message if only we take the time to really look. Individually each flower, fruit, bird, or animal is unique and shows the care and attention God has given to designing and making it. Collectively they display the glory, the abundance, the beauty of God’s Creation.  Laudato Si!

So far as the rose is concerned, there are hundreds of varieties for sale, but in order to ensure that each grows true to type it is necessary for the nurseryman to graft the variety he wants onto a wild rose root stock. It seems that simply taking a cutting taken from an existing rose bush will not guarantee that the resulting plant will flower as expected. It will not develop to its full capacity; indeed it may well revert to the wild! Of course, the wild root stock is still alive, it will throw out shoots and if not checked will bloom. That is what had happened here - the single five petal rose was the flower of the wild rose.
So what is the lesson the rose bush has for us today? Think of it this way; the old man created in Adam is the wild rose – attractive enough in its own way but not developed to achieve its full potential. The new rose is the new Man. The old Man is still there, but now it has been given a new life through the Holy Spirit.  As St Paul wrote to the young church at Ephesus:  ‘so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:17-19(NIV)

Interestingly, the wild rose flowered for a very short time and then faded away whilst the rose grafted onto it has put forth a mass of flowers this year.