Growing roses is an ancestral tradition
Esther Ortiz, 71, and Thelma Ortiz Muraida, 73, are sisters who grew up on the city’s West Side in a house right behind the Little Flower School, next to the famous basilica of the same name.
In many ways, their upbringing was typical of so many working-class families striving toward the middle class, moving up by way of Kelly AFB jobs.
Their hardworking father built their house and worked two jobs to pay for Catholic school tuition and piano and violin lessons. He started out as a migrant farm worker but then got a job as an aircraft sheet-metal worker.
Their mother, legally blind from birth, never worked outside the home. But within it, she cooked meals from scratch and sewed her daughters’ clothes. She sang. She encouraged her daughters to draw and paint.
“They saved their money and bought a piano,” Ortiz said.
Ortiz was trained as a classical violinist and played professionally. She recalled her mother’s visits to the cloistered Carmelite convent, making sure Ortiz brought her violin along.
Muraida studied art at Trinity University, weaving professionally in New York’s fabric industry and later working in book publishing. She illustrated various children’s books.
They inherited so much from their parents — and from their mother, maternal grandmother and a beloved aunt, a love of growing roses.
That’s why Ortiz reached out to say the roses are in bloom. This time of year reminds her of so many San Antonio families who used to grow roses, passing down an ancestral tradition with religious, spiritual and cultural ties.
That was evident in Ortiz’s backyard, where the three of us met on a cloudy day of a total solar eclipse.
Her garden reminded me of those of the señoras in my childhood neighborhood, who tended roses, pruning them instinctively. They cut prized stems and took them to church or gave them to others. Because roses help. Ortiz fought off the depression of losing her mother in 2015 and her aunt who died less than 24 hours later. The family held joint funerals. Then in 2018, the sisters lost their father to cancer.
Roses helped.
Ortiz first went back to her father’s love of the soil, remembering how they worked the dirt together.
After buying her first couple of rose plants, Ortiz revisited her parents’ home and dug up her mother’s roses, replanting them in her own garden.
The rose bushes multiplied, including Earth-kind roses recommended by the Texas Agrilife Extension Service for being disease- and droughttolerant.
The sisters became rosarians, drawing from their culture and faith. They grew up around roses, which were bountiful at their basilica. They were in the ground and on the altar, placed there by the women of the church, especially in front of La Virgen de Guadalupe.
Roses are stories, they said, appearing in the prayers linked to their rosary beads and in the ultimate rose story, that of St. Juan Diego who in 1531 reported the miraculous appearances of a brown-skinned Marian figure on a hill in what is now Mexico City.
Catholic schoolchildren learned of the roses that fell from his cloak as he recounted the story of the Virgen’s appearance to church officials.
No matter how much they cost these days, roses appear before Guadalupe in the most surprising places — at the site of an accident that claimed someone’s life, on a modest altar in a Mexican restaurant, on a bumper sticker of an old truck.
There’s another reason the Ortiz sisters reached out. They want to pass on their love of roses and draw future rosarians to the San Antonio Rose Society’s spring rose show at 1 p.m. Saturday at the San Antonio Garden Center.
Ortiz serves as the group’s membership chair. Muraida edits and designs its newsletter and writes its “De La Rosa” column, which draws from history to tell rose stories.
If the group sounds intimidating, it’s not, they say. While some members grow roses competitively, Ortiz says more than half grow roses because their mothers and grandmothers did.
It’s an ancestral remembrance. Muraida recalls her stays with her grandmother on Lombrano Street, which featured a garden with roses, a small fishpond and pecan trees.
The rose show comes at the start of Fiesta, and the Ortiz sisters invite you to attend. Nothing fancy. It will feature members’ roses and the winners of its “My Fiesta Rose” art contest for San Antonio Independent School District middle schools.
The group meets every second Monday. Otherwise, you might see one of its knowledgeable rosarians at a table at Fanick’s Garden Center or Rainbow Gardens.
Ortiz promises that if you have a question about growing roses, “We’ll get a rosarian on it right away.”
April’s newsletter promises new blooms this month and a reminder that Earth Day is just around the corner.
It’s a perfect time to appreciate and protect nature and the queen of all gardens — the rose.