That picture reminds me, I’ve now gone far enough into the warm season to see what all the plants in the yard look like in bloom, and all 3 trees and a bunch of the bushes have these kinda koosh-ball flowers in various tropical pastels

Not my thing, also the trees kinda have leaves like pea pods and I’d prefer something broader for the shade, also they seem to constantly be shedding something or other onto the sidewalk

Also there are roses which are kind of a bitch especially when the yard was left to seed for years, those things require constant pruning to keep shape and they’re just a mess now

Because they’ve been bred for flower appearance and not, like, in any other way constituting a functional plant

Portland’s the “Rose City”, we have gardens and a parade every year, apparently a city founder kept a rose garden in his yard with a set of clippers chained to the fence inviting people to take and transplant them

A lot of it is as a frontier town Portland lacked for luxuries (famously settled by overland caravan, East Coast and European crafts required the difficult transit around South America [or portage in Panama] until its connection to transcontinental rail in 1880) and roses filled in as an available signifier of refinement - demanding regular fussy care and yielding no product, but otherwise easily transportable and requiring only dirt, rain, and sun.

This is similar to the identification of Texas with the yellow rose, basically identical to the Rose Parade and Bowl of Pasadena, which began (like Palm Beach) as a “society” resort before becoming the “cultured” suburb of oil-boom LA, the kind of place that contained old money and new money but exclusively people who were aware of the distinction