Location Taken: Skihist Provincial Park, British Columbia
Time Taken: June 2010
I’m fairly sure this is some variety of rose, though one of the wild types instead of the cultivated and highly modified variants you see in the flower shops. Either that or it just looks a lot like a rose, which is close enough for me.
My grandma has a few rose bushes that look a lot like this one. They’re fairly large, the size of small trees.
I always associate them with one of the odd tasks set by my grandmother during the many summers I spent at her place during my childhood. Perhaps I remember this task because it was so peculiar, or maybe it was just because I got paid.
You see, these rose bushes were infested with hordes and hordes of rose chafers at the height of summer, as they sought out both food and mates. Let them run wild and all your pretty roses will be stripped bare in no time.
Incidentally, I just learned it’s rose chafer, not rose shaver. They sound alike, I never saw it written out, and the second one made more sense given how those bugs ripped apart the plants…
In order to keep her plants at least somewhat intact, my grandma made use of the random grandchildren running around the place. She’d give us a jar full of soapy water and tell us she’d pay us a penny for every rose chafer we brought back drowned in the jar.
It was, as you may expect, effective. It was oddly fun pulling the bugs off the bushes. They were rather dumb bugs, didn’t really struggle at all, and you’d frequently find stacks of them just sitting around. I’ll let you figure out why they were stacked. I was too young and innocent to have a clue about that at the time. But it did mean you could collect a goodly number fairly quickly, which even at a penny a pop still added up.
So for hours at a time, I’d wander around pulling bugs off roses and drowning them in soapy water for the sake of fun and a few dollars to spend on candy or toys. Ah, the good old days.
