Roses that grow in the open…

… are easy enough to walk around and harvest, for humans, deer and late winter birds.

It’s when they grow inside a thicket, planted there by deer, I suspect, but perhaps also by those birds, that they make the thicket thorny, tangled and impenetrable.

It’s like the deer are closing the world behind them as they pass. After all, deer need thickets to bear their young, and although humans are attracted to rose flowers just as bees are, we’re not going to follow them into the thickets. Reactions are aesthetic, instead. So are we trained to know our place.

The roses leave the thickets open for birds and bees, though. For them, thickets are porous membranes, kept porous because roses need a certain amount of light, which appears as space — bird-sized space.

And the rose calls them. So are birds trained by roses, too.