I looked last week at the roses at two corners of the roof garden. The other two corners, as I have shown previously, are occupied by two pots of bougainvillea, which I have had from the days I took up gardening, though there were earlier on the balcony, and were moved up only last year.

In the centre of the roof garden are two large and deep basins, the first of which, near the stairs, has a temple flower tree while there are two lime trees in the other. From the beginning there were roses in the first basin, one plant put in early on at the northeastern edge, near the stairway, and then another alongside it. The former has kept producing little red roses over the last year, but the other was slower, and has only occasionally produced large white blossoms. But this month it surpassed itself, and had four blossoms, verging on light pink.

You see all of them in the first picture, together with three smaller flowers in the first rose tree there on the left. Beyond, at the opposite corner to this tree is a taller red rose tree, one of those Anuruddha gave me, with one blossom high above the others. Sadly the two other rose trees in this basin, also given by Anuruddha, had no blossoms this time round, though a couple of weeks earlier one of them had had a massive flower, just like the one that had thrilled me when he made me his present.

Further still in this first picture you see a rose in the next basin along. This is on the plant in the northwest corner, with one lime tree to the east and the other to the south. The second picture here gives you a closer view of that purple flower, while beyond it, through the luscious lime leaves, you can see two blossoms on the plant in the opposite corner. These should have been a vibrant orange, as the original flower on the tree was when I bought it, but as I showed a few weeks back its new home has softened its shade. But as the third picture shows, the blossoms are large and luscious and there are several together, and their colour is splendidly set off by the darker green of the lime tree behind them.

The next picture shows one of these flowers by itself, to highlight its beautiful form as well as the colour, a pale orange. Then to match this is one of the flowers in the other basin, which I showed at the start, a pale pink though that I had thought had originally had white blossoms. I show after that a side view of one of these blossoms, with the red flowers beside it in contrast, and then there is a close up of one of those red flowers.

And I conclude, for good measure, with a picture of the red tree from the other side, with a pink one beside it, these again in that first basin with which I started. But I should add that perhaps not all the pictures will appear, for the internet on this ship seems slow.