Tucked away behind a house in the rural town of Miami, Oklahoma, is a climbing rosebush like no other, Edna’s rosebush. Not only does it put forth giant flowers resembling a peony more than a rose, this 60-year-old bush can tell calendar time. Without fail, the roses bloom forth as a group each year for the first time exactly on Mother’s Day. This year, some 75 buds waited patiently a week for the morning of May 10. It was overcast, with threatening storms, but by 8:30 a.m., the roses had bloomed in concert, the weight of their petals dragging their branches down.
No one tends these roses, no one has lived at their house for more than 12 years, and their namesake, the woman who planted the bush as a start from another, has been dead for 10 years. Why do the roses keep blooming exactly on Mother’s Day, and how do they know what day that is? What clue prompts their chlorophyll to surge? Once bloomed each year, the bush continues to have blooms off and on until the end of the summer, then goes dormant again, only to wait for yet another Mother’s Day.
