In 1991, after I left my job as a securities trader for a large New York bank, my soon-to-be-husband and I purchased a house in Connecticut, on a tiny property on Long Island Sound. It was my first house, and we embarked upon a major landscaping project. My previous experience in gardening had been limited to growing a few vegetables at the local, hippie-run public elementary school I attended in Northern California in the early 1970s. There, we seemed to be assessed more harshly on our understanding of ecology than of geometry, which didn’t sync with my natural interests. I just wanted a sheet of math problems to figure out, not time spent digging in the dirt. I didn’t come away with a lot of gardening knowledge, and that hadn’t changed much in the 20 years that followed.

But now I had a house with a yard. I picked up lots of gardening books and started subscribing to gardening magazines (preferably organic gardening, as the hippies did leave their mark). As I perused the photographs, I came to realize that there may be nothing more lovely than a rose bush in full bloom. It was that point that I became a rosarian, even before planting a single bush.

I’d caught the rose bug.

I have always been an all-or-nothing person. If a subject interests me, I will research it using any available source, until I get to the point where I am just re-reading the same facts in a different format. In this way, studying roses became my new “job.” I spent hours every day reading about their care, their history and about hybridization. (What did we do before the Internet?)

I pored over catalogs of old roses, looking for likely candidates for our small garden. I crossed out all the roses that weren’t disease-resistant and repeat bloomers. The one-time-blooming roses finish in about three weeks; coming from California, summer in the northeast felt so short to me already. I needed roses that would keep blooming through the summer. And as I didn’t plan to be spraying a bunch of toxic pesticides and fungicides on my plants (and myself, inevitably), I needed plants that could defend themselves against our dreaded July/August black spot fungus (which can totally defoliate the more fragile roses), not to mention the scourges of powdery mildew and aphids.

As I continued to study roses in photos and around the neighborhood, I found myself drawn more and more to the traditional form of older roses, which don’t look anything like modern, “Mother’s Day” roses. Those florist-store roses are hybrid tea roses, bred and cross-bred to develop tightly wrapped petals around the high center. Unfortunately, all that breeding and hybridizing eliminates nearly all the scent from the blossoms and makes the plant highly susceptible to disease. The more I learned, the less I wanted those roses. I finally settled on a sampling of several roses, most of which I purchased in groups, to make a stronger statement in the garden.

In June, when roses are at their peak, I try to start each morning with a walk around the garden, enjoying the simple, changing beauty of my roses.

It’s all a rosarian could ask for.