Lisburn Exiles Forum

(Site is no longer operational pending a major long overdue overhaul of the entire website. Thank you for your patience. Site should still be visible and searchable for old posts.)

The Lisburn Exiles Forum is dedicated to the memory of James Goddard Collins (The Boss) who single-handedly built LISBURN.COM (with a lot of help from many contributors) from 1996 to 29th November 2012. This website was his passion and helping people with a common interest in the City of Lisburn around the world is his lasting legacy.


Lisburn Exiles Forum
Start a New Topic 
Author
Comment
The Rose Trials

This week the Rose Trials are being held in Lady Dixon Park.

Dominic, Colette and I plus the dogs, took a race down this morning. It was a beautiful, sunny morning, nice and warm too. There were quite a few cars in the car park when we arrived. We put the dogs' leads on and headed in no particular direction because the roses were just everywhere. Such displays I never saw before in my life, not even in McCready's Rose Gardens. All colours and types with beautiful scents. There was just an array of colours as far as the eye could see. As well as the rose beds, there were arbours covered in rambling roses. We walked underneath these and enjoyed the shade. Pagodas also stood covered in roses too.

As we walked along, I bent down to smell each different variety. I love a flower with a scent. As I lifted my head after sniffing another rose, I just caught sight of a photographer's camera flashing. Me, smelling a rose. I'll be famous if my photograph is printed in tomorrow's morning paper. I rushed to tell Dominic and Colette but they had had their photo taken too. Ah well, that brought me down to earth.

There was also a marquee from which we could hear music. On further investigation, and to our delight, Irish dancers were on stage. There were seats outside the marquee and quite a wee crowd were sitting enjoying the dancing. The younger of the dancers were like wee dolls. They must have been only about 3 or 4 years old. The bigger girls and boys did a Riverdance routine. It was all brilliant.

We met an awful lot of people with different types of dogs. Most of them stopped for a chat about dogs in general, temperament, breeding, etc. etc. Tess loved having the company and greeted each dog with a welcoming sniff.

It was a lovely, unexpected morning. To think the rose trials are held literally on our doorstep and we never attended until today. We got talking to some of the judges too. A few of them had come over from England, just for the day. They were lucky with the weather. Other judges had accents from where I know not. As we would say here - foreigners anyhow.

Roses grow on you, you know.