When I first walked through my current apartment, on a warm July day five years ago, I noticed an old rose bush outside. It grew in a scraggly shape against the stone wall of the house, its highest buds reaching up to the windowsill of my future bedroom.

After I moved in, one of my upstairs neighbours, a landscape gardener, showed me how to prune the rose. I learned to pay attention to bud eyes and always count the leaves growing from each stem before deciding where to cut (five, in case you’re wondering). Be ruthless, my neighbour said. The more you cut back the stems, the stronger the plant will become.

Did I immediately turn this into an allegory for resilience? You bet. I only later learned that if you cut the stems back too much and too often, the plant will get stressed. And if you’re not supporting your rose properly when planting her in a new spot, she’ll go into ‘transplant shock’.

Apart from that though, roses really are survivors. My crone of a rose – an evergreen Southeast Asian variety – seems to endure both drought and frost with equanimity. Pests and fungi try their luck: every spring, her leaves are tainted with mildew, or the insides of her thickest stems turn brown. When this happens, I cut back as much as I can, until she is all sharp prickles and no blooms.

And each time, about five weeks later, the shrub has doubled in size and a sisterhood of deep red flowers appears, fragrant and delicate.

As my apartment is once again filled with bouquets and this smell humans have been bottling for millennia, I remember it’s not all for me. The rose would bloom even if I wasn’t here; bumblebees depend on her. And yet, I also feel we have a relationship, she and I. She has taught me about the changing of the seasons, the sacrifices of winter and summer both. She taught me what you can gain if you’re prepared to lose something.

When I think of the astrology of early September, ‘pruning season’ comes to mind. Or maybe: The Great Letting Go. One seems more intentional, more self-directed than the other but why can’t it be both? This coming Sunday, September 7, we have a Lunar Eclipse in Pisces, which is basically a Full Moon that’s noticeably more intense than all the other Full Moons during the year. If you feel particularly thin-skinned, weepy or just generally exhausted this week, it might well be the Eclipse having its way with you. But and also: this Lunar Eclipse is a moment in the year where you can prune your internal (emotional, mental, spiritual) garden. Perhaps it helps you see, for the first time, a patch of beliefs that always seemed obvious and ‘normal’ to you, a heap of assumptions that were ‘just there’, making you quietly miserable. What might bloom inside you if you carried some of those weeds over to the compost heap?

As in nature, the new blooms, and the beauty they bring, might not be visible for many weeks or months to come. But trust that, by pruning, you have done the most important part. The rest is just patience. ‘A wild patience’, as poet Adrienne Rich would say.

Inspiration and further reading

Alexander Chee’s incredible personal essay The Rosary was heavily on my mind as I wrote the piece above. Much of what I know about roses - and becoming oneself - I learned from that essay.