She looked at Pamela a long moment, then pulled off her old gardening gloves, finger by finger, laid them next to her roses, and stepped out in front of that whole room, and she didn’t come toward Pamela at all. She walked past her, over to Pamela’s own exhibit table, and picked up the little printed entry tag off the front of it.
She held it up so the back rows could see it.
“Pamela,” she said, “would you read your own tag out loud for everybody?”
Pamela wouldn’t. So Ruthie did. Class four, hybrid tea, imported stock. Cultivar name: Coyne’s Ruth.
“That’s a registered variety,” Ruthie said. “Somebody bred that. Somebody sat with it for eleven years to get that color. Do you happen to know who?”
Pamela said she bought them from a specialty grower in Oregon, like that answered anything.
Then Ruthie asked the judge if he still carried the registry.
Every accredited judge does. It’s a fat little book they use to verify class entries, and that man had it in his case under the table, and I have never seen a grown man so relieved to be given something to do. He found the page in about twenty seconds and read the entry to the room, because Ruthie asked him to, and because by then nobody in that hall was going to tell her no.
Registered 1998. Breeder of record, Walter D. Coyne, of this county. Ruthie’s husband. Dead six years this April. He bred that rose in five-gallon buckets behind a mobile home off Route 10, because that is the dirt he had, and when the registry asked him for his terms of release he wrote them a sentence they printed word for word:
No license and no fee, to anybody who wants to grow it. Named for my wife, who can make anything bloom in anything.
Pamela Ashcroft had paid a specialty grower ninety dollars a plant for cuttings her own club member’s husband gave away free for twenty years.
Ruthie set the tag back down on the table, careful, like it was Pamela’s and she wanted to return it in good shape. Then she said the only hard thing she said all night, and she said it kindly, which made it worse.
“You’ve been growing Walt’s roses in front of me for three years. You never once asked me a question about them. I’d have told you they hate wet feet.”
Then she went and got her gloves.
The judge gave Pamela the mic back. She didn’t take it.
She resigned the presidency in May, in a two-line letter, no explanation offered and none asked for. In June she drove out to Route 10 with eleven bags of good soil in her trunk and sat in the car for a while before she knocked. Ruthie let her in. They spent that afternoon repotting, and Pamela’s hands were filthy for the first time in her life, and she was quiet the whole way through it.
The club meets at Ruthie’s twice a season now. She teaches the bucket method. There’s a waiting list.
People will tell you where you belong based on the ground you’re standing on. They rarely think to ask what you grew in it.