Our Valentine verse begins

Usage examples of roses.

My dear friend Brenda Preston, whose roses have given me such pleasure through the years, and who provided useful information about them.

He carried her the rest of the way, despite his bad leg, as easily as if she were a child, under a trellis bowed with a profusion of Silver Moon roses, filling the air with their perfume, down the narrow flight of slate steps to his basement.

Gay, giddy dinners with Gerald and the Golds at Le Chambord, her precious roses, and, oh God, this wonderful house.

Someone had left a bouquet of baby-pink roses at the grave, though everyone should have known there were to be no flowers.

Never look up from pruning her roses and find him smiling down at her from the terrace.

It had gotten a bit overgrown, the French lace laden down with rose-cream buds crowding up against the lavender Blue Nile, and the tea roses had climbed right off the trellis and were taking over the whole south wall.

In the moonlight, Sylvie could make out the shapes of her roses, but no colors, as if she were looking at a black and white photograph.

Like arranging roses in her best Waterford vase after a hard morning of pulling weeds in the hot sun.

Sylvie caught the shimmery amber reflection of a slender woman wearing a crepe gown the color of Blue Nile roses, her pale hair caught up with two antique silver combs.

Go and take a ride to cheer you up after all this dismal talk, and get back your roses before luncheon time.

Wild roses and sweetbrier sent up their evening incense to the radiant sky.

Climbing roses and honeysuckles trailed their fragrant branches round the grim stone pillars of the portico.

When they had gone away, nearly six months before, those bleak avenues had been leafy arcades, where the birds sang all the bright day long, flowers had bloomed wherever her eye rested, and red roses and sweetbrier had twined themselves around the low windows and stone pillars of the portico.

Now the trees were writhing skeletons, the flowers dead with the summer, nothing left of the roses but rattling brown stalks, and the fish-pond lying under the frowning wintry sky like a sheet of steel.

She thought of Glen Keith as she had seen it once, old and storied, and gray and grand, with ivy and roses clustering round its gray walls, and its waving trees casting inviting shadows.