International Rose Test Garden

     I never have been a huge fan of roses. They're pretty, but my favorite flowers are Tulips and Gerber Daisies. For prom even I had simply a single Gerber Daisy that I could hold during pictures and then put down to dance. Corsages never fit my little wrists and got in the way of dancing. And roses tended to be in corsages, and I just didn't need them. 
     That being said, the International Rose Test Garden in Portland is amazing. I had no idea how many different kinds of roses there are, it's really quite impressive. It's not just variations of color, but also of size, shape and most surprisingly, smell. The fact that the smell can vary so much completely caught me off guard. My friend Andrea and I spent essentially all our time in the garden with our noses in flowers, attempting to articulate the differences in smell, which varied from sweet, to musty, to lemony. I'm sure we sounded like weird flower sommeliers spewing off strange descriptions, but we had a fantastic time.