One of the motifs of the second half of Under the Poppy, The Garden Path, is the garden: as fecund sanctuary, as repository of desire, as a kind of outlaw, out-of-real-time zone where paths cross and things can be said, amongst the greenery, that can be expressed nowhere else.  Some of this began brewing for me a good two – was it three? – years ago, when a very dear friend shared some memories of a beautifully sexual (though not at all physical) encounter in a garden setting.

So I started to read about formal flower gardens, rose gardens in particular – the working title for Part 2 was Floribunda, but the story took a turn that made that title less resonant, and I liked the idea of the garden path as a place of trickery, or deception; not everything in the garden is just as it seems. But there are roses aplenty in the story nonetheless . . . Have you ever been pierced, really hurt, by a thorn on a rose?

This variety is called “Imagine,” and was given to me by another dear friend, Jane, as my Christmas gift last year – quite independent of this project, she had no idea roses would figure prominently in this book, Part 2 wasn’t even a book, then.  But still she gave me a rose.