I come from a family of gardening women, with one difference. My mother and grandmother focused on vegetables and cute annuals, with a few perennials or reseeding plants thrown in. I went for roses.

When I was about 12 I came across a distressed Pure Poetry rose at a greenhouse sale. My mother informed me that roses were very difficult to grow, and if I really wanted to, she’d let me try it out in a small patch to the side of her garden.

That one rose lasted for ten years and opened the door to so many amazing varieties. No longer were roses off limits to me because they were ‘too hard’! By the time I moved out at 18 there was a thriving rose garden in the front yard, and a few miniature roses in the back yard. I promptly started pruning and restoring the roses set to run wild in my new home, and after I left there and moved here, I decided to just get rid of the lawn and have a garden or five instead.