For Wilshire Baptist Church
Rose rosette. Have you heard of it? Have you seen it? Sounds lovely, but it’s not lovely at all. It’s a parasitic disease spread by tiny mites that is knocking out knock out roses all across the country. It was first seen in knock out roses in Kentucky in 2009, and the sad irony is that as knock out roses have become wildly popular for their resistance to disease, their planting from coast to coast has helped spread the one disease that it can’t resist.
Rose bushes with rosette look peculiar. Unlike healthy rose stalks that are green, rosette stalks are bright red. Instead of having large, evenly spaced thorns, they grow a fir of tiny, soft spikes. Rosette stalks grow fast, towering over healthy growth and no doubt sucking moisture away from the healthy stalks. If rosette stalks produce flowers at all, they are shrunken or deformed or never fully open.
We planted a bed of a dozen knock out roses a few years ago on our side street as a natural barrier between the sidewalk and our backyard. We planted them small and nursed them through freezes and droughts and just as they were starting to get tall and spreading out to touch each other, they were stricken with rosette.
There’s no known cure for rosette and it’s just a matter of time before we dig out our knock outs and plant something else. Down the street, the City of Garland dug out a large hedge of diseased knock outs and replaced it with pampas grass. We’ll probably replace ours with red crepe myrtles. Until then, we’ve been biding our time by going out every couple of weeks and cutting off the new rosette growth. They look better after the trimming, but the healthy stalks look tired and with every pruning session the bushes get smaller. We’re just putting off the inevitable.
Rosette is a bully. It keeps coming back, pestering the same plant over and over again. It looks impressive from a distance but take a closer look and it’s ugly and gaudy. Its thorns look fierce but they are actually soft to the touch. Its stalks look thick and strong but they’re hollow and weak and can be broken with the slightest effort. More than anything rosette crowds out the healthy growth in a selfish “look at me” way. Ultimately, it won’t go away on its own. There’s no cure. Eventually it must be dealt with in the most severe way.
I can handle the bully rosette. People are another matter, especially in this age when bullying isn’t always so recognizable. It was easier back when bullying was mostly physical and thus more noticeable. You could see it and deal with it. It’s different now with social media; it can be emotional, psychological, anonymous and viral all at once.
I don’t recall ever being bullied directly, which I think means I’m lucky. I never got stuffed in a school locker, pantsed in the hallway, mocked and jeered, pushed to the ground. I’ve witnessed adult bullying in the business world. I once had a boss who in a meeting invited a colleague to step outside for a fistfight. Imagine that – a grown man behaving like a schoolyard bully. He was put in corporate timeout and the rest of us enjoyed the sunshine for a month. I had another boss who shamed employees by email and copied everyone else on the message. I suppose she thought we might learn from each other’s mistakes. The only thing I learned was it was time to look for a new job.
A lot of bullying today is subtle and yet cumulative in a way that undermines what good people think and believe and what they are trying to do for their families and communities. It comes from people who can only build themselves up by putting other people down. They fill the airwaves and social media with their intellectual and moral superiority and self-righteous indignation.
I’m sick and tired of them all, but there’s little I can do but ignore them and not lend them my ears or my mouth and certainly not my heart and soul. Meanwhile, the rosette will be dispatched with sheers and a shovel before summer ends.