Her Name is Rose breath away. Watch, and within the hour they will unfurl into big fat cups and hold the twilight until morning. They can be sloppy though, those capricious ladies of the garden. After their garden appearance, they get, well . . . blowsy. Like women who have stayed out too late, they need to be escorted home. Okay, better, she thought. From the table where she sat she looked up and out across her garden—the wild garden she’d been cultivating under the inconstant sun of the west of Ireland for twenty-five years in Ashwood, the middle of the Clare countryside. Cultivating wilderness, that’s what she’d been doing. And she’d given part of her soul to it. Beyond the high fuchsia hedges bordering the garden, the land was boggy and rush-laden—rushes tall as hazel rods and the earth full of clay, but inside, the sticky soil had become a rich loam. Seaweed, gathered off the rocks at Doughmore, and leaf mold, gathered from the ash and sycamore trees, and her own kitchen waste and garden clippings had turned the blue gley soil a healthy black, and yielded exotics like the rare lady slipper orchid. Three perennial borders sloped southward toward the unseen River Shannon. A rose bed lined the eastern edge. It was Luke who’d insisted on the rose bed because roses had meanings in his family. The Bowens, from Dublin, had their customs. You gave a rose when a child was born. You gave one on a significant anniversary: a fortieth birthday—a Just Joey, a fi ftieth—a Gertrude Jekyll. You planted a rose in the name of someone who had died. Luke had taught her that. Between the living and the dead, a rose, he’d said. From that April day in 1987 when she and Luke first arrived— when initially it seemed only the brambles thrived—the wilderness
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